Operational Mindset and Reliability Questions

Evaluates a candidate's operational ownership of production systems and their approach to designing and operating for reliability. Topics include incident response and on call practices, creating and using runbooks and playbooks, blameless postmortems and root cause analysis, monitoring and observability strategies including metrics, logging, and distributed tracing, alerting and escalation policies, service level objectives and service level agreements and error budgets, capacity planning and load testing, fault tolerance and graceful degradation patterns such as redundancy, replication, failover, retries, and backpressure, automation to reduce operational toil including runbook automation and infrastructure as code, and continuous improvement driven by postmortem action items and testing. Candidates should be prepared to describe concrete examples of incident handling and improving service reliability, how they balance reliability against cost and time to market, and how they collaborate with site reliability engineering, operations, platform, and product teams to set and meet reliability targets.