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
Design a small chaos experiment for a stateful API to reduce the risk of cascading failures. Describe the hypothesis, blast-radius controls, rollback criteria, required monitoring/metrics, and how you would debrief the team and incorporate learnings into runbooks.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
While on-call you must choose between a fast mitigation that risks duplicate user data versus a slower fix that preserves data consistency. Walk through your decision process under time pressure: what criteria matter (SLOs, data integrity, business impact), who you notify, and how you document the decision and rollback plan.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
You need budget approval to replace a legacy datastore to improve reliability. Draft a concise, evidence-backed pitch: what metrics and incidents you will present, a pilot plan, estimated costs and ROI, and fallback/rollback options. Explain the key data you would collect beforehand to support your case.
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
A junior SRE on your team tends to apply quick patches without considering long-term consequences. How would you coach them to improve trade-off analysis and structured decision-making? Provide concrete exercises, feedback mechanisms and milestones to track progress.
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