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
During an audit you discover some on-call rotation records and incident commander logs are missing for several significant incidents. How would you remediate the missing audit trail, restore accountability, and ensure this does not recur? Include immediate actions and long-term process or tooling changes.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Case: A critical alert repeatedly fires due to an upstream retry misconfiguration, causing constant paging and resource exhaustion. You must stop the noise immediately, fix the root cause, and restore trust in the on-call system. Outline immediate steps, short-term fixes, and long-term safeguards including ownership agreements.
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.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Describe pre-approved mitigations and playbooks an on-call engineer should have for large-scale cloud provider outages (for example, an AWS region down). Cover multi-region failover steps, database consistency considerations, DNS changes, and required privileges for safe execution.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
For on-call paging, what are reasonable response-time SLAs by severity (e.g., sev0/sev1/sev2)? Explain how you would justify and set these numbers based on SLOs, business impact, and technical constraints.
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