Technical Problem Solving and Ownership Questions

Covers the ability to diagnose, triage, and resolve complex technical problems end to end while demonstrating personal ownership. Candidates should show deep technical reasoning about system architecture, integration complexity, data migration considerations, and custom configuration trade offs. Expect discussion of root cause analysis, diagnostic techniques, reproducible debugging, and risk mitigation strategies. Candidates should be able to explain design trade offs, propose practical solutions, assess business impact, and describe collaboration with stakeholders and cross functional teams. Emphasis should be placed on concrete actions the candidate took, how they prioritized options, and the measurable results and lessons learned.

MediumSystem Design

0 practiced

Design an observability dashboard for end-to-end pipeline SLIs. The dashboard should include ingestion freshness, per-stage latency, throughput, error rates, consumer lag, and data-quality indicators. Describe widgets, aggregations (per-minute, per-hour, percentiles), thresholds, and how you'd present different views for SREs vs product analysts.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

In Python, implement a function dedupe_records(records, key) that takes a list of dictionaries and returns a new list preserving order but keeping only the first record for each unique value of records[i][key]. Assume records fit in memory. Provide a 3-line example input and expected output in your answer.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Your pipeline writes per-customer partitions. An upstream bug appears to have corrupted data for a subset of customers. Describe a forensic approach to identify affected partitions and customers, compute the scope and impact, and perform a safe rollback or reprocessing strategy. Include specific tools, metadata, and verification steps you'd use.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

You observe growing consumer lag for a Kafka consumer group reading the 'events' topic. Outline the investigation steps you would take to triage the backlog. Include checks on producer rate, broker health, partition imbalance, consumer group offsets, GC/CPU on consumers, and retention/compaction settings. Mention quick mitigations and what data you'd collect to present to your team.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

You're on-call for a daily ETL pipeline that produced data 3 hours late and the last run was incomplete. Describe a step-by-step root cause analysis (RCA) process you would follow to diagnose the issue end-to-end. Specify the evidence you'd collect (logs, metrics, offsets, timestamps), how you'd build a timeline, how you'd reproduce the problem safely, and how you'd determine whether the cause is upstream, in your pipeline, or downstream. Also mention quick mitigations you might apply while investigating.

Unlock Full Question Bank

Get access to hundreds of Technical Problem Solving and Ownership interview questions and detailed answers.

Join thousands of developers preparing for their dream job.