Problem Solving Behaviors and Decision Making Questions
Covers the interpersonal and cognitive traits that shape how a candidate solves problems, including initiative, ownership, proactivity, resilience, creativity, continuous learning, and evaluating trade offs. Interviewers probe when a candidate takes initiative versus seeks help, how they balance speed versus quality, how they persist through setbacks, how they generate creative alternatives, and how they learn from outcomes. This topic assesses mindset, judgment, and the ability to make principled decisions under uncertainty.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
During a severe incident you are the most senior on-call but parts of the system are owned by external teams. Describe how you would take command of incident response, ensure cross-team alignment, make decisions with incomplete data, and brief executives. Include role assignments, communication cadence, and decision handoffs.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Two monitoring systems show conflicting error rates: system A reports 2% errors, system B reports 0.2%. How would you determine which metric to trust, reconcile the discrepancy, and prevent recurring conflicts? Describe investigative steps and longer-term fixes.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
A critical third-party API your service relies on is intermittently failing. You can build a local caching/fallback layer (weeks) or press the vendor for SLA improvements and dedicated support (uncertain timeline). As a senior SRE, describe your decision process, immediate risk mitigations, long-term strategy, and vendor management considerations.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Key monitoring dashboards are flaky and sometimes missing data. How do you make reliability and operational decisions (alert thresholds, incident severity, release gates) when observability is unreliable? Describe immediate mitigations and a longer-term plan to improve data quality and confidence.
EasyBehavioral
0 practiced
Tell me about a time you took ownership of a failing service that was not formally in your team's domain. Describe how you decided to act, how you coordinated with the owning team, what concrete steps you took to stabilize service, and how you ensured follow-through (e.g., post-incident actions or handover). Explain any trade-offs you made.
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