Roadmaps

Each roadmap is a reading order for one kind of engineering job, from the basics up to what a senior engineer is expected to know. It is split into stages, and every topic links to a page to read or a simulator to try. There are 8 roadmaps with 670 topics between them.

Topics are marked core, recommended or optional, and each roadmap can show only the core ones if you are starting out.

• Building APIs and backend servicesBackend engineer
• A system design interviewSystem design
• Building web interfacesFrontend engineer
• Running infrastructure and being on callDevOps and SRE
• Keeping systems and data safeSecurity engineer
• A coding interviewData structures and algorithms
• Data pipelines and machine learningData and ML engineering
• Running workloads on AWS, GCP or AzureCloud engineer

• Backend engineer

  15 stages, 163 topics

  HTTP, databases, caching, queues and APIs, up to designing a distributed backend.

  1. The internet and HTTP
  2. OS and networking foundations
  3. Version control
  4. Pick a language
  5. Design principles and patterns
  6. APIs and protocols
  7. Databases
  8. Caching
  9. Web security
  10. Testing
  11. Containers and orchestration
  12. Scaling out
  13. Distributed systems
  14. Observability
  15. System design

• System design

  15 stages, 91 topics

  Load balancers, caches, storage and replication, up to complete interview designs.

  1. Trade-offs and terms
  2. The edge: DNS, CDNs and anycast
  3. Load balancing and reverse proxies
  4. The application tier
  5. Relational databases
  6. NoSQL databases
  7. Sharding and denormalisation
  8. Caching
  9. Queues, workers and back-pressure
  10. Communication protocols
  11. Capacity estimates
  12. Failure modes
  13. Security in system design
  14. Observability
  15. Worked problems

• Frontend engineer

  16 stages, 95 topics

  How the browser loads and draws a page, up to the architecture of a large frontend.

  1. How the web loads
  2. HTML and semantics
  3. CSS and layout
  4. JavaScript
  5. TypeScript
  6. The DOM and browser APIs
  7. Version control and collaboration
  8. Build tools and packages
  9. Pick a framework
  10. State and data fetching
  11. Styling and design systems
  12. Rendering and architecture
  13. Performance and Core Web Vitals
  14. Accessibility
  15. Testing
  16. Frontend system design

• DevOps and SRE

  14 stages, 69 topics

  The Linux shell, CI/CD, containers, Kubernetes, monitoring and being on call.

  1. Linux and the shell
  2. Networking for ops
  3. Version control and collaboration
  4. CI/CD pipelines
  5. Containers (Docker)
  6. Kubernetes
  7. Infrastructure as code
  8. Configuration and secrets
  9. Cloud platforms
  10. Observability
  11. Scaling and load management
  12. Reliability engineering
  13. Security and compliance
  14. Platform engineering

• Security engineer

  14 stages, 65 topics

  Cryptography, authentication, web vulnerabilities and securing cloud systems.

  1. Foundations and threat modelling
  2. Cryptography basics
  3. Authentication
  4. Authorization and access control
  5. Network security
  6. Web application security
  7. API and service security
  8. Secure development
  9. Secrets and key management
  10. Cloud security
  11. Container and Kubernetes security
  12. Logging, monitoring and detection
  13. Incident response and forensics
  14. Offensive security and red teaming

• Data structures and algorithms

  14 stages, 70 topics

  Data structures, algorithms and the patterns behind coding interview questions.

  1. Complexity and Big-O
  2. Arrays and strings
  3. Hashing
  4. Linked lists, stacks and queues
  5. Trees and binary search trees
  6. Heaps and priority queues
  7. Balanced and specialised trees
  8. Graphs and traversal
  9. Shortest paths and other graph algorithms
  10. Sorting and searching
  11. Recursion and backtracking
  12. Dynamic programming
  13. Greedy algorithms and divide and conquer
  14. Interview patterns and practice

• Data and ML engineering

  14 stages, 70 topics

  SQL, pipelines and warehouses, up to training and serving models.

  1. Data foundations and SQL
  2. Relational databases and modelling
  3. NoSQL databases
  4. Storage engines and file formats
  5. Batch processing
  6. Streaming
  7. Pipelines and orchestration
  8. Data warehouses and the lakehouse
  9. Data quality, governance and observability
  10. Distributed data
  11. Machine learning fundamentals
  12. Feature engineering and feature stores
  13. Training and experiments
  14. Model serving and MLOps

• Cloud engineer

  8 stages, 47 topics

  Networks, identity, compute and storage in the cloud, up to systems that span regions.

  1. Linux and networking
  2. Core cloud services
  3. VPCs and cloud networking
  4. Containers and Kubernetes
  5. Infrastructure as code and CI/CD
  6. Observability and reliability
  7. Security and cost
  8. High availability, disaster recovery and multi-region

Codex · How it works · Simulators