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.

HardTechnical

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Propose a chaos engineering experiment to validate that your recovery runbooks work for a critical service. Include hypothesis, blast radius controls, observability required, rollback plan, communication plan, and how you will assess whether the runbook needs improvement.

EasyBehavioral

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You receive a request to implement an SLO for a new service. Before starting work, list the clarifying questions you would ask the product and engineering owners to ensure you fully understand requirements, constraints, and success criteria.

MediumTechnical

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You have noisy alerts that cause alert fatigue. Propose a systematic plan to tune alerting: include how you identify noisy alerts, decide thresholds, group or route alerts, and communicate changes to teams so they understand the new alert behavior.

MediumTechnical

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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.

MediumTechnical

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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?

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