Individual Mentoring and Coaching Questions

Covers mentoring, coaching, and developing individual contributors across career stages from entry level to senior. Interviewers evaluate one on one coaching skills and structured mentoring approaches, including diagnosing mentee needs, setting growth goals, designing tailored learning and career plans, giving constructive feedback, running effective reviews or critiques, delegating progressively challenging work, scaffolding learning, and creating psychological safety. This topic also encompasses supporting promotions and transitions, balancing technical skill coaching with leadership and career coaching, measuring mentee progress and development outcomes such as promotions, increased ownership, retention or improved performance metrics, and contributing to succession planning. Candidates should be prepared to give concrete examples of mentees, the actions taken to teach or correct behavior, how they documented or institutionalized learnings, and how they adapted style for different learners while preserving individual development.

EasyTechnical

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You're assigned a weekly 30-minute one-on-one with a junior SRE who's anxious about their first on-call rotation. Describe a practical agenda for the first three meetings, list 6 diagnostic questions to uncover knowledge gaps, explain how you'd set and track 2–3 actionable follow-ups, and describe remote-specific considerations for psychological safety and asynchronous check-ins.

HardTechnical

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A mentee's service keeps missing SLOs despite a sequence of code fixes. Describe a coaching investigation and remediation plan that helps the mentee diagnose underlying causes (technical debt, deployment process, monitoring blindspots), and how you'd mentor them to own long-term reliability improvements while balancing feature work.

EasyTechnical

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You mentor multiple SREs with limited time. Propose a decision framework to prioritize learning topics (SLO design, observability, infra-as-code, security) across mentees with different goals. Provide two example tailored assignments matched to two distinct career objectives.

MediumTechnical

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Design a rotating pair-programming program for SREs to spread operational knowledge. Define rotation cadence, pairing rules (senior/junior mix), session length, success criteria, and how mentors should coach during sessions so learning is maximized without risking production stability.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Design an equitable on-call mentorship policy to ensure both junior and senior SREs receive exposure and support. Include rotation scheduling, pairing rules, mentor coverage during nights, handling emergency time-off for mentors, and how to adjust for fairness when services differ in noise and criticality.

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