Operational Excellence and Platform Reliability Questions

Candidates should explain approaches to achieving operational excellence and platform reliability at scale. Topics include on call models and rotations, incident response and incident command structure, blameless post mortem practices, service level objectives and error budgets, observability and alerting strategies, runbook and automation development, capacity planning and failure injection and testing, release and rollback strategies such as canary and blue green deployments, and metrics including mean time to detect, mean time to restore, and change failure rate. Interviewers evaluate both the technical systems and the cultural practices used to balance reliability and development velocity and how reliability work is prioritized and measured.