Enterprise Operations & Incident Management Topics
Large-scale operational practices for enterprise systems including major incident response, crisis leadership, enterprise-scale troubleshooting, business continuity planning, and recovery. Covers coordination across teams during high-severity incidents, forensic investigation, decision-making under pressure, post-incident processes, and resilience architecture. Distinct from Security & Compliance in its focus on operational coordination and recovery rather than preventive security.
Prevention and Long Term Solutions
Focuses on the engineering practices and organizational changes taken after an incident or defect to prevent recurrence and to improve long term reliability. Candidates should be prepared to describe concrete preventive actions such as adding or improving unit tests, integration tests and end to end tests; increasing observability through structured logging, metrics and distributed tracing; defining meaningful alerts and service level objectives; refactoring code and modularizing components to reduce coupling; introducing safer deployment patterns such as staged rollouts and feature toggles; improving continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines; creating runbooks and ownership documentation; and managing technical debt. Interviewers will look for trade off reasoning, how prevention work was prioritized, and measurable signals showing reduced recurrence or improved system health.
Operational Resilience and Monitoring
Focuses on keeping critical systems reliable and recoverable in the face of failures, attacks, and operational disruption. Topics include designing infrastructure for reliability at scale, handling high volume logging and telemetry without data loss or performance degradation, ensuring detection and response continue during component failures, disaster recovery planning for critical security and business systems, cost and operational trade offs for large scale deployments, and strategies for monitoring the monitoring infrastructure to verify that security information and event management and intrusion detection systems are functioning correctly. Also include incident response coordination, alerting thresholds, observability, and business continuity considerations.
Learning From Failure and Continuous Improvement
This topic focuses on how candidates reflect on mistakes, failed experiments, and suboptimal outcomes and convert those experiences into durable learning and process improvement. Interviewers evaluate ability to describe what went wrong, perform root cause analysis, execute immediate remediation and course correction, run blameless postmortems or retrospectives, and implement systemic changes such as new guardrails, tests, or documentation. The scope includes individual growth habits and team level practices for institutionalizing lessons, measuring the impact of changes, promoting psychological safety for experimentation, and mentoring others to apply learned improvements. Candidates should demonstrate humility, data driven diagnosis, iterative experimentation, and examples showing how failure led to measurable better outcomes at project or organizational scale.
DoorDash Service Debugging
Approach to diagnosing and resolving production incidents and service defects within delivery platform services. Candidates should demonstrate how to use logs, metrics, distributed tracing, request replay, and system topology reasoning to isolate issues such as misrouting from load balancers, race conditions in payment flows, or incorrect aggregation of metrics. Good answers include safe mitigation steps, validation of fixes, roll back or compensating actions, and lessons that feed into post incident improvements.
Operational Excellence and Resilience
Design and operationalize systems and processes that deliver efficiency, cost effectiveness, and resilient service delivery. Cover approaches to cost optimization and right sizing, automation and self healing, monitoring and observability, service level objectives and agreements, incident response and disaster recovery planning, chaos engineering and resilience testing, capacity planning, and continuous improvement practices. Candidates should explain trade offs between cost and reliability, instrumentation and alerting strategies, and how to measure and improve operational maturity.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Designing and maintaining plans, architectures, and processes to ensure service continuity and recoverability after major incidents or disasters. Topics include defining Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective, conducting business impact analysis and tiering services by criticality, dependency mapping and recovery ordering, selecting replication and backup strategies including synchronous and asynchronous replication, active active and active passive topologies, snapshots and transaction log based point in time recovery, and planning cold, warm, and hot recovery sites. Also covers failover and failback procedures, orchestration and automation of recovery workflows, runbook creation and stakeholder roles and communications, regular disaster recovery testing and exercises including tabletop, simulated failover, full recovery drills and chaos engineering, metrics tracking such as mean time to recovery and actual Recovery Time Objective achieved, off site and geographic redundancy considerations, cloud versus on premise trade offs, regulatory and data residency requirements, and postexercise reviews to close recovery gaps.