Technical Challenges and Opportunities Questions

This topic covers a candidate's ability to understand, evaluate, and engage with the concrete technical challenges and project opportunities a team is addressing. Candidates should be able to ask about and explain the current system architecture, infrastructure initiatives, and stack choices; identify major architecture trade offs and areas of technical debt; and describe scalability, performance, and reliability concerns. They should be able to evaluate projects such as migrations, infrastructure scaling, developer tooling improvements, reliability and observability work, and platform changes in terms of design decisions, trade offs, testing strategies, rollout and deployment approaches, rollback and maintenance plans, and long term operability. Candidates should demonstrate familiarity with operational practices including monitoring and observability, incident response and postmortems, service level objectives and error budgets, continuous integration and continuous delivery, and capacity planning. The topic assesses problem framing, prioritization, and impact thinking by asking how engineering work moves key product metrics and user experience, and it invites discussion of how engineers at different seniority levels can contribute through execution, ownership, mentorship, and technical leadership.