Adaptability and Resilience Questions

Assesses a candidate's ability to remain effective and productive when circumstances change, requirements shift, or setbacks occur. This topic covers personal and team level behaviors including rapid reprioritization, learning new skills or domains quickly, coping and recovering after failure, stress management, emotional composure, sustaining morale, and tactics for keeping work moving during transitions. Interviewers will probe concrete examples that show pragmatic decision making under pressure, persistence on hard problems, how the candidate pivoted strategies, how they supported others through change, and lessons learned that improved future outcomes. Senior evaluations additionally look for how the candidate sets guard rails, balances short term fixes with long term health, and enables others to act in ambiguous situations.

MediumSystem Design

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Design a lightweight runbook template and onboarding checklist that helps engineers adapt quickly to new failure modes. Specify essential fields (symptoms, quick mitigations, escalation path, verification steps, owner), versioning and review cadence, and how runbooks should be surfaced during incidents.

HardTechnical

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A dependency change pushed by another team caused cascading failures. That owning team refuses to accept responsibility. Explain how you would mitigate the outage technically now, then design cross-team policies (API contracts, change controls, automated tests) and an enforcement approach to prevent similar incidents while navigating the political friction.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

A major release has introduced regressions causing customer errors. You have two immediate options: rollback the release or craft a hotfix. Describe the concrete criteria you would use to choose one path over the other when information is incomplete, including how you evaluate risk, time-to-fix, revertability, and communication with PMs and leadership.

EasyBehavioral

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How do you manage personal stress and maintain composure during high-pressure SRE incidents? Describe concrete techniques you use while on-call (mental techniques, procedural checklists, delegation tactics), give an example where those techniques helped you stay effective, and explain how you avoid burnout over time.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain the concept of an error budget and how you would use it to reprioritize work when requirements shift or when the system experiences regression. Provide a concrete numeric example (SLO, current error rate, remaining budget) and describe how you'd communicate trade-offs between feature delivery and reliability to product stakeholders.

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