IICTI Certified Backend Developer

Holders demonstrate that they can apply and evaluate distributed systems design and consistency trade-offs, aPI architecture, contracts and evolution, advanced data modelling, transactions and query performance and event-driven architecture and asynchronous messaging, plus 7 further areas, in realistic professional scenarios, as defined in the AQSCERT scheme for Backend Developer.

Who it is for: Professionals working, or preparing to work, in software development roles.

1. 01Distributed systems design and consistency trade-offs5% of the exam

   • Architect backend services whose consistency and availability behaviour is explicit under partial failure.
   • Scope: CAP and PACELC, consistency models, consensus (Raft), idempotency, exactly-once illusions, clocks and ordering, partial failure and backpressure.
2. 02API architecture, contracts and evolution15% of the exam

   • Design API contracts that evolve safely across many consumers without breaking changes.
   • Scope: REST, gRPC and GraphQL trade-offs, OpenAPI and AsyncAPI contract-first design, versioning and deprecation, pagination and rate limiting, API gateways and backward compatibility.
3. 03Advanced data modelling, transactions and query performance14% of the exam

   • Diagnose and resolve data integrity and performance problems in high-throughput transactional systems.
   • Scope: Isolation levels and anomalies, MVCC, locking and deadlocks, query planning and indexing strategy, partitioning and sharding, zero-downtime schema migrations.
4. 04Event-driven architecture and asynchronous messaging7% of the exam

   • Design event-driven workflows that preserve data consistency across service boundaries.
   • Scope: Kafka and message brokers, delivery semantics, transactional outbox and CDC (Debezium), saga orchestration and choreography, event sourcing and CQRS, schema registries.
5. 05Caching, scalability and performance engineering13% of the exam

   • Evaluate and optimize backend throughput and latency against defined performance budgets.
   • Scope: Cache-aside and write-through patterns, invalidation and stampede protection, CDN and edge caching, horizontal scaling, connection pooling, load testing and profiling.
6. 06Resilience engineering for backend services5% of the exam

   • Design services that degrade gracefully and recover automatically from dependency failures.
   • Scope: Timeouts, retries with jitter, circuit breakers, bulkheads, load shedding, graceful degradation, dependency failure modes and chaos experiments.
7. 07Application security for backend systems15% of the exam

   • Architect authentication, authorization and data-protection controls that withstand API-centric attacks.
   • Scope: OWASP Top 10 and API Security Top 10, OAuth 2.1 and OIDC, token and session design, authorization models (RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC), secrets management, secure deserialization and input handling.
8. 08Observability and production debugging6% of the exam

   • Diagnose production incidents across distributed services using correlated telemetry.
   • Scope: OpenTelemetry tracing, structured logging, metrics and RED/USE methods, SLOs and error budgets, distributed trace analysis, profiling in production.
9. 09Cloud-native deployment and platform integration9% of the exam

   • Design backend deployment strategies that enable safe, frequent releases on cloud-native platforms.
   • Scope: Containerization and Kubernetes workload design, twelve-factor configuration, serverless trade-offs, progressive delivery (canary, blue-green, feature flags), multi-tenancy patterns.
10. 10Service decomposition and architecture governance7% of the exam

    • Lead architecture decisions that balance team autonomy, coupling and long-term maintainability.
    • Scope: Domain-driven design and bounded contexts, modular monolith vs microservices, strangler fig migration, architecture decision records, fitness functions and technical debt management.
11. 11Data privacy, compliance and auditability in backend systems4% of the exam

    • Design backend data flows that meet privacy and regulatory requirements by construction.
    • Scope: GDPR data minimization and erasure, encryption at rest and in transit, field-level encryption and tokenization, audit logging, data residency and retention enforcement.

Question types

Single choice 100%

Delivery

Online (remote proctored), Test centre, On-site (corporate)

Retakes

Up to three attempts within any 12-month period. A 14-day waiting period applies after a first unsuccessful attempt and 30 days after a second. Each retake requires a new booking and fee. Retakes draw a different randomised form from the question bank.

Provisional cut score — psychometric validation is required before live delivery. Blueprint v1.0.

1. 1

   Register

   Create a free account and start the programme.

2. 2

   Practice

   Online practice test (coming soon).

3. 3

   Training

   Optional

   Online course or classroom — or skip it.

4. 4

   Certification

   Independent exam and certification decision.

Training is optional and does not by itself confer certification. Find a training partner