Ownership and Reliability Questions
Demonstrating personal ownership and accountability for reliability outcomes. Interviewers look for examples of taking responsibility for tasks such as database administration or production runbooks, following through on incidents to resolution, proactively communicating status and risks, owning operational improvements, and going beyond minimal requirements to ensure reliability. This topic focuses on behavioral examples, communication, and demonstrated follow through.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Daily deployments are causing an increasing number of deployment-related incidents. Propose a long-term reliability program (policy, tooling, cultural changes) to reduce deployment risk while preserving developer velocity. Include measurable success metrics and a phased rollout plan.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Walk through how you'd own capacity planning for a service with strong seasonality (peaks of ~10x baseline). Which metrics would you collect, what forecasting techniques would you use, how much buffer would you provision, and how would you communicate capacity risk and cost trade-offs to stakeholders?
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
You're asked to own observability improvements for a core service. Create a prioritized plan that lists which SLIs, logs, and traces you would add first, how you'd instrument the code, and how you would measure improvement in detection and mean time to resolution (MTTR).
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
You inherited a weekly manual scaling procedure for a compute cluster that often misses traffic spikes. Propose an automation plan to eliminate the manual process. Explain metrics to drive autoscaling, safety limits, testing strategy in staging, rollback behavior, and how you would document and handover ownership.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You are the incident commander for a multi-hour outage affecting multiple services across regions with partial data loss for some customers. As the SRE leading the response, describe how you coordinate responders, make triage and escalation decisions under uncertainty, manage public and internal communications, and plan the post-incident remediation that prevents recurrence.
Unlock Full Question Bank
Get access to hundreds of Ownership and Reliability interview questions and detailed answers.
Sign in to ContinueJoin thousands of developers preparing for their dream job.