Advanced Spring Transactions Interview Questions for Senior Engineers

Advanced Spring Transactions Interview Questions for Senior Engineers Work through these 12 questions out loud. Open any question for the full model answer, the trap to avoid, and the follow-up a panel usually asks.

  1. What is dependency injection and why does Spring use it?

    DI supplies collaborators from outside the class — typically via constructor. Problem solved: tight coupling to concrete classes, hard unit tests, scattered object...

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  2. Saga pattern — choreography vs orchestration?

    Order saga: reserve inventory → charge payment → ship. Failure at payment triggers release inventory compensation. Orchestration clearer for complex flows with visibility....

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  3. Explain the transactional outbox pattern.

    OrderService @Transactional saves Order and OutboxEvent(type=ORDER_CREATED, payload=json). OutboxProcessor @Scheduled polls FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED, sends to Kafka, updates...

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  4. What happens if @Transactional fails midway? How do you verify rollback?

    Default: runtime exception marks rollback-only; transaction commits nothing on exit. ```java @Transactional(rollbackFor = Exception.class) public void placeOrder(Order o) {...

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  5. New deployment causes random 5xx errors. Rollback fixes it. Why?

    Compare metrics before/after: error rate, pool saturation, GC. Enable DEBUG temporarily in canary pod only. Check new dependency version, connection pool default change, or...

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  6. How do you stop a LangChain4j agent loop from running forever, and who owns the workflow?

    I set maxSequentialToolsInvocations to a small number — three or four for triage. Writes take an idempotency key. Approve is not a @Tool. Automating a business process with AI...

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  7. What is the N+1 query problem and how do you fix it?

    Loading 100 orders then accessing each order's items triggers 101 queries. Fix with JOIN FETCH in JPQL, @EntityGraph on repository method, or a DTO query selecting only...

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  8. How does @Transactional work?

    Spring creates a proxy around @Transactional beans. Calling createOrder() from another bean starts a transaction on the thread-bound EntityManager; commit on success, rollback...

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  9. How do Spring application events work with @EventListener?

    OrderService publishes OrderCreatedEvent after save. EmailListener @EventListener sends confirmation. @TransactionalEventListener(AFTER_COMMIT) prevents email on rolled-back...

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  10. Load shedding and backpressure in microservices?

    Tomcat max queue + reject policy returns 503 with Retry-After. WebClient timeout + circuit breaker stops calling slow dependency. Kafka consumer pause partitions when...

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  11. How does Spring Boot auto-configuration work?

    @SpringBootApplication enables @EnableAutoConfiguration, which loads candidate configs from starters. Each auto-config uses @ConditionalOn* to register beans only when...

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  12. Describe the Spring Bean lifecycle.

    Container instantiates the bean, injects dependencies, runs BeanPostProcessors, then @PostConstruct or InitializingBean. Singleton lives for context lifetime; prototype creates...

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Spring Transactions Interview Questions and Answers · Top 50 Spring Transactions Interview Questions and Answers (2026 Edition) · Top 40 Spring Transactions Interview Questions | Must-Prepare before interview. · Spring Transactions Interview Questions Every Fresher Must Know

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