Over the past few years, I’ve worked on systems serving ~6M monthly users and currently operate backend services handling ~1300 rps production traffic. A lot of my work involves things like autoscaling services, async job processing, data pipelines (~400GB), and deployments where we need zero downtime (blue-green / rolling deploys).
I’ve also solved 300+ LeetCode problems and understand the algorithm grind. I can push through it if needed.
But I’ve noticed something interesting about myself: what really excites me is operating real systems under load - debugging production issues, designing services that scale, handling burst traffic across many instances, and improving latency through infrastructure changes.
Sometimes it feels like interview prep pushes heavily toward algorithm puzzles, while the engineering work I enjoy most is around distributed systems and production architecture.
Curious how founders and engineers here evaluate this balance when hiring.
Is strong production systems experience still a meaningful signal compared to heavy algorithm interview prep?