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Technical Background and Learning Questions

Describe your technical expertise, including primary programming languages, frameworks, tools, domains you have worked in, architectures and systems you have built or operated, and the scope of responsibilities you held on projects. Provide concrete project examples that include your role, the problems you solved, design or implementation decisions, measurable outcomes, and tradeoffs considered. In addition, demonstrate your continuous learning practices and learning velocity: give examples of times you rapidly learned a new technology or domain, how you ramped up on unfamiliar systems, timelines for skill acquisition, and the concrete impact of that learning on project results. Explain your habitual strategies for staying current such as self study, courses, certifications, mentorship, code reviews, open source contributions, conference attendance, or reading, and how you assess and prioritize skill gaps. If applicable, discuss how you teach or mentor others, transfer knowledge within a team, and set goals for future technical growth.

EasyBehavioral
0 practiced
Give an example where you mentored a peer or onboarded a new SRE. Explain the structure of the mentorship or onboarding, the materials or systems you created (playbooks, labs), measurable outcomes (time-to-competency, incident handling), and how you tailored the approach to the person's background.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Share an example of how you evaluated trade-offs when introducing automation (for example, automated rollbacks or autoscaling policies): safety, complexity, monitoring requirements, and long-term maintenance. Which trade-offs caused you to delay or re-scope automation and why?
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Provide a case where you had to learn an unfamiliar domain deeply (for example, distributed consensus algorithms or storage internals) to influence architecture decisions. Explain your learning path (reading, experiments), the experiments you ran, the trade-offs you recommended, and how you convinced architects to change designs.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Walk me through a single production service or system you were responsible for operating. Describe the architecture (components and interactions), scale (e.g., requests/second, number of nodes), SLOs or SLAs you were given, your operational responsibilities (on-call, runbooks, automation), and one concrete change you implemented that improved reliability. Provide metrics where possible.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
A critical decision requires sunsetting a legacy, unstable platform that a handful of teams still rely on. As platform owner, define a migration playbook that includes learning transfers, deprecation timelines, compatibility shims, and incentives (cost, feature parity, timelines) to accelerate migration while keeping support costs low.

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