Problem Solving and Analytical Thinking Questions

Evaluates a candidate's systematic and logical approach to unfamiliar, ambiguous, or complex problems across technical, product, business, security, and operational contexts. Candidates should be able to clarify objectives and constraints, ask effective clarifying questions, decompose problems into smaller components, identify root causes, form and test hypotheses, and enumerate and compare multiple solution options. Interviewers look for clear reasoning about trade offs and edge cases, avoidance of premature conclusions, use of repeatable frameworks or methodologies, prioritization of investigations, design of safe experiments and measurement of outcomes, iteration based on feedback, validation of fixes, documentation of results, and conversion of lessons learned into process improvements. Responses should clearly communicate the thought process, justify choices, surface assumptions and failure modes, and demonstrate learning from prior problem solving experiences.

HardTechnical

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Case study: A periodic latency spike occurs around the same time every night and traces show it aligns with backup jobs running on the storage cluster. Design an operational plan to verify causation (experiments to run), reduce impact (scheduling, throttling, priority I/O), and preserve backup integrity, plus how you would monitor to ensure the mitigation is effective.

MediumTechnical

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How do you prioritize which alerts to reduce, combine, or keep active while maintaining service reliability and respecting error budgets? Describe a repeatable framework for prioritization that balances noise reduction with early detection of regressions.

HardTechnical

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You need to evaluate whether a patch reduced error rates for a rare failure (say baseline 1 error per 10,000 requests). Explain a statistical testing plan: which test to use (Poisson, binomial), how to compute required sample size or test duration for a desired power, how to handle low counts and zero-inflation, and how to control Type I and Type II errors when stakes are high.

EasyTechnical

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Monitoring shows a sudden 5x increase in HTTP 5xx responses for Service A over the last 10 minutes. Describe step-by-step how you would triage this issue: which dashboards, metrics, logs, traces, deployment and config sources you'd check, how you'd narrow down root causes, and what immediate mitigations you might apply while preserving evidence for post-incident analysis.

HardTechnical

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You must choose between three mitigations for persistent high RTT between two services: raise client timeouts and add retries, route traffic via an alternate path with higher cost, or reprovision network hardware. Describe a decision matrix that scores each option against criteria (time-to-implement, risk, user-impact, cost, observability), explain how you'd run small experiments to validate assumptions, and recommend which to pick first and why.

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