Problem Solving and Communication Approach Questions

Covers the practice of solving technical problems while clearly communicating the thought process. Includes clarifying requirements, asking targeted questions, decomposing problems into subproblems, proposing brute force and optimized approaches, stating assumptions, discussing time and space complexity and trade offs, walking through examples and edge cases, and narrating debugging and recovery when stuck. Also includes collaboration during problem solving, readiness to accept hints, and ability to explain reasoning so others can follow and learn. This area is commonly tested in coding interviews and whiteboard scenarios where the candidate's communication of reasoning and process is as important as the final solution.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Walk through a concrete debugging example that includes metrics and traces: you observe a memory leak in a containerized service causing OOM kills over 24 hours. Explain what data you collect, sample queries or trace snippets you'd run, and how you isolate the leaking component.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

Design a capacity planning and autoscaling strategy for a service expected to grow 10x in a year. Include forecasting techniques, safety margins, cost vs. performance trade-offs, SLO alignment, and how you would present the plan and risks to engineering leadership and finance.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

You cannot reproduce an issue in staging but production is experiencing intermittent failures. Outline a clear debugging plan to proceed without blocking production, including what changes you would request (e.g., sampling, additional logging) and how you'd communicate the plan and risks to stakeholders.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

A product manager requests an aggressive SLO of 99.99% for a new feature. As the SRE, what clarifying questions do you ask, what preliminary SLO would you propose if any, and how do you explain the operational and cost trade-offs to the product manager?

MediumSystem Design

0 practiced

Design an incident command structure for a cross-team outage that affects frontend, backend, and database teams. Define roles, responsibilities, communication channels, timing checkpoints, and how to hand off at the end of the incident.

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