Technical Leadership and Architectural Influence Questions

Demonstrating leadership in technical decisions at the architecture or system level. Candidates should prepare concrete examples where they identified architectural problems, evaluated alternative solutions and trade offs, proposed a preferred design, gained buy in from engineers and stakeholders, and drove implementation. Discuss systems thinking and long term impact on team velocity, code quality, reliability, and product features. Include examples of championing new tools or frameworks, leading migrations or refactors, negotiating trade offs between time to market and technical debt, and occasions when you reversed a decision based on new data. Emphasize communication of complex technical ideas, consensus building with peers, and measurable outcomes.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Write Python-style pseudocode for an idempotent HTTP ingest handler that uses Redis to store a request_id with TTL. The handler should: 1) accept requests containing request_id and payload, 2) ensure a request with the same request_id is processed at most once, 3) return the previous result for duplicate request_id, and 4) handle transient Redis failures safely.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Define a measurement plan to quantify the long-term impact on team velocity after introducing domain-driven microservices. Specify metrics (deploy frequency, cycle time, PR size, incidents per release), data sources, analysis windows, control groups, and methods to attribute change to the architecture rather than unrelated factors.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Design a safe, backward-compatible event schema evolution strategy for an event-driven platform with multiple consumers in different languages. Include a schema registry approach, semantic versioning rules, CI contract tests (consumer-driven), runtime guards, and a migration pattern for breaking changes.

MediumSystem Design

0 practiced

Design a microservice API for a data enrichment service used by multiple downstream teams. Requirements: peak load 1,000 req/s, P95 latency target 200ms, idempotent operations, and schema versioning. Specify endpoints, request/response contract (fields), idempotency approach, error model, and an outline of capacity planning.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

Design a globally distributed microservice architecture for a read-heavy feature that must deliver <100ms p95 read latency for EU and APAC users and 99.9% availability. Requirements: eventual consistency for analytics, daily aggregated metrics. Discuss region placement, data replication strategy, cache warmup and invalidation, routing, and failure scenarios.

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