Spring Boot Developer Interview Questions & Screening

Introduction

Hiring a skilled Spring Boot Developer is essential for teams building production-grade Java services and microservices. The right candidate contributes maintainable code, reliable APIs, and practical experience with the Spring ecosystem.

This guide offers structured interview prompts for screening and selection, grouped into basic, intermediate, and advanced levels. It also provides five one-way video questions tailored for ScreeningHive to speed up pre-screening and improve consistency.

Spring Boot Developer Interview Questions

Basic Spring Boot Developer Interview Questions

• What is Spring Boot and how does it simplify application development compared to the core Spring Framework?
• How do application.properties and application.yml differ and when would you choose one over the other?
• What are Spring Boot starters and how do they help with dependency management?
• Explain dependency injection in Spring and the common ways to declare beans.
• How do you create a simple REST controller and map endpoints in Spring Boot?
• What is Spring Data JPA and how does it simplify CRUD operations and repository patterns?
• How do Spring profiles work and how are they used for environment-specific configuration?
• What is Spring Boot Actuator and which endpoints are most useful for monitoring?

Intermediate Spring Boot Developer Interview Questions

• How would you implement global exception handling for REST APIs in a Spring Boot application?
• Describe how to secure APIs using Spring Security with JWT or OAuth2. What are the key components?
• Explain transactional behavior in Spring. How do propagation and isolation settings affect method execution?
• How would you add caching to a Spring Boot service and which annotations and cache managers would you consider?
• What strategies do you use to externalize configuration across environments in a microservice architecture?
• How do you write unit tests and integration tests for controllers, services, and repositories in Spring Boot? Mention common tools and annotations.
• How do you implement pagination and sorting with Spring Data repositories and pageable requests?
• Which Actuator or custom health indicators would you add to support production readiness?
• How would you integrate a Spring Boot service with a message broker like Kafka or RabbitMQ and handle message retries and failures?
• What steps and tools would you use to diagnose and resolve a memory or thread-related performance issue?

Advanced Spring Boot Developer Interview Questions

• Describe a plan to migrate a monolithic Spring application to Spring Boot microservices. What patterns and incremental steps would you follow?
• How do you implement distributed tracing and end to end observability across several Spring Boot services?
• What patterns do you apply to improve resilience in microservices, such as circuit breaker, bulkhead, and retry strategies?
• How would you tune a high-throughput Spring Boot service at the JVM, database, and framework levels?
• When is reactive programming with Spring WebFlux appropriate, and how does it differ from servlet based MVC?
• How do you design database schema evolution and migrations for services that share or replicate data?
• What are secure approaches to manage secrets and configuration in cloud deployments for Spring Boot applications?
• How would you create a custom Spring Boot starter or auto configuration module and what compatibility concerns matter?
• Describe approaches to implement multi-tenancy in Spring Boot and the trade offs between schema, database, and row level strategies.
• How do you drive adoption of Spring Boot best practices within a team through reviews, standards, and mentoring?

Pre-Screening Video Interview Questions for Spring Boot Developer

These five one-way video questions are ideal for ScreeningHive pre-screening. They assess technical knowledge, design thinking, problem solving, and communication before scheduling live interviews.

1. Describe a recent Spring Boot project you worked on, your responsibilities, and the main technical challenges you resolved.

   This evaluates hands-on experience, ownership, and the candidate's ability to explain technical outcomes.

2. How do you secure REST endpoints in Spring Boot? Provide a concrete example of an authentication or authorization flow you implemented.

   This checks practical knowledge of Spring Security, token handling, and endpoint protection.

3. Walk through how you would diagnose a slow or failing endpoint in production. Which metrics and tools would you use and what steps would you take first?

   This assesses operational troubleshooting, monitoring familiarity, and prioritization under pressure.

4. Share a microservice design decision you made to improve scalability or reliability and explain the trade offs you considered.

   This reveals system design reasoning, trade off awareness, and alignment with business goals.

5. Describe your testing strategy for a Spring Boot service, including unit, integration, and end to end testing approaches and tools.

   This demonstrates attention to quality, test tooling knowledge, and how the candidate ensures long term maintainability.

Conclusion / CTA

These Spring Boot Developer interview prompts help hiring teams standardize technical screening and identify candidates with the right mix of hands-on skills and design judgment. The layered structure from basic to advanced supports targeted evaluation for different hiring levels.

ScreeningHive one-way video interviews deliver faster screening, consistent evaluation, and clearer candidate feedback to streamline hiring. Start using structured one-way interviews on ScreeningHive to reduce interview time and improve hiring decisions.