Technical Communication and Decision Making Questions

Focuses on the ability to explain technical solutions, justify trade offs, and collaborate effectively across engineering and non engineering stakeholders. Topics include articulating design decisions and their impact on reliability performance and maintenance, walking through solutions step by step, explaining algorithmic complexity and trade offs, asking clarifying questions about requirements, writing clear comments documentation bug reports and tickets, conducting and communicating root cause analysis, participating constructively in code reviews, and negotiating quality versus delivery trade offs with product and operations partners. Interviewers evaluate clarity of expression, reasoning behind decisions, and the ability to make choices that balance short term needs and long term quality.

HardTechnical

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Create a structured incident notification template designed to be easily translated and adapted across multiple teams and regions. The template must include: incident ID, human-readable impact summary, a short technical summary (engineer-facing), mitigation steps already taken, current next steps, timestamps in ISO format, and a clear contact for escalation. Provide the template and explain two rules you followed to make it translation-friendly.

HardTechnical

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As an SRE manager you want to change the on-call rotation to reduce burnout, but engineering managers are concerned about coverage and cost. Prepare a proposal that includes proposed schedule changes, an analysis of current alert load and coverage gaps, estimated cost of overtime versus hiring, and a 6-week pilot plan to validate the change with measurable success criteria.

HardSystem Design

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You must evaluate two competing technical proposals for implementing leader election across distributed services: a Raft-based approach versus a database-lock-based approach. Produce a concise decision memo (200–400 words) that lists pros and cons, expected reliability characteristics, operational complexity and costs, common failure modes, and your final recommendation including migration considerations.

MediumTechnical

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A PM asks you to add a feature that would multiply metric cardinality by 10x. Explain concisely how you'd communicate concerns about cost, alert noise, and query performance to the PM, and propose two mitigation alternatives (one design change and one monitoring workaround).

MediumBehavioral

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You review a postmortem draft that contains the sentence 'The junior engineer failed to follow the checklist and thus caused the outage.' Rewrite that sentence to be blameless and systemic. Then describe three editorial guidelines you would add to your postmortem review checklist to avoid blame language in the future.

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