Technology Stack and Tooling Questions

Focuses on familiarity with common technologies and the rationale for choosing them. Includes knowledge of databases both relational and nonrelational, caching layers, message queues, containerization and orchestration, monitoring and logging tools, continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, and cloud versus on premise tradeoffs. Candidates should understand the role each tool plays in a system, when to adopt a technology based on system requirements and constraints, and tradeoffs in terms of operational complexity, cost, performance and team capability.

MediumTechnical

95 practiced

Estimate the monthly cloud cost impact of moving a steady 1,000 requests-per-second service from EC2 (self-managed) to an EKS-based container platform. Outline the factors to include (compute, control plane, load balancers, storage, data transfer, logging, monitoring) and describe how you would validate your estimate with tests or pilot runs.

MediumTechnical

69 practiced

You plan to evaluate and onboard an observability stack (Prometheus + Grafana + Loki) for a small team with limited SRE experience. Outline a rollout plan that includes instrumentation priorities, dashboards, alerting, training, pilot services, and success metrics for adoption over a quarter.

MediumTechnical

71 practiced

Design a CI/CD pipeline for a microservices architecture with 20 services that ensures fast feedback during development, safe canary/rolling deployments in production, and reliable rollback. Provide a concise example GitHub Actions workflow YAML you would use to build, test, and push a single service image, and describe how you would scale runners and store artifacts at team scale.

HardTechnical

66 practiced

Your leadership wants Mean Time To Detect (MTTD) to improve by 3x. As EM, propose a measurable plan that covers instrumentation gaps, improving alert signal-to-noise, synthetic monitoring, on-call rotations and training, runbook quality, and KPI tracking. Provide a rollout timeline and how you'd measure success.

EasyTechnical

74 practiced

List and explain the core components of a CI/CD pipeline (source control, build, test, artifact storage, deployment, and verification). As an EM, recommend specific tools or configurations for small teams versus larger organizations and explain why.

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