How should I prepare for U.S. software engineer interviews to avoid getting rejected?

I've been looking at backend and full-stack roles recently, and it feels like LeetCode is just the threshold; what really trips people up is not being able to explain their projects clearly and being too vague about system design. If you list microservices, caching, and queues on your resume, interviewers will definitely follow up on how you handle traffic in production, how you handle retries…