On Call and Work Availability Questions
Candidate availability expectations and flexibility for operational responsibilities. Topics include on call commitments, shift schedules, time zone constraints, responsiveness during urgent incidents, ability to participate in drills and on demand mitigation, and honesty about personal constraints. Interviewers may probe for preferred schedules, limits on availability, and willingness to handle urgent infrastructure issues.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Design an automated detection system that determines an on-call engineer is unreachable within ten minutes (no ack, no heartbeat) and escalates safely while avoiding false positives for scheduled 'do not disturb' states (calendar integration, known travel). Describe required signals, thresholds, and safeguards.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Case study: During a global outage you must coordinate five teams across regions. Describe the communication channels, incident roles (IC, scribe, liaisons), structure of incident calls, and techniques to reduce communication overhead while keeping stakeholders informed.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Describe the ideal information to include when handing off an on-call shift to the next engineer. Provide a checklist that covers open incidents, recent changes, monitoring anomalies, scheduled tasks, and local context such as timezone-specific behaviors.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Describe a sensible escalation policy for on-call alerts in an enterprise: include tiers (primary, secondary, manager), typical timeout values, notification channels, and guidance on when to escalate to leadership or product owners.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
You need to grant an external contractor temporary on-call access for a week. Describe a secure access model including least-privilege principles, short-lived credentials, audit logging, session recording (if applicable), and revocation procedures after the engagement.
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