Technical Leadership and Initiative Ownership Questions
Leading technical initiatives from problem identification through design, implementation, deployment, and long term maintenance, while owning both technical decisions and program execution. Candidates should be prepared to explain how they identified opportunities or problems, built a business case, defined scope and success metrics, secured stakeholder buy in, created project plans and milestones, allocated resources, and coordinated cross functional teams. They should describe architecture and tooling choices, trade offs considered, handling of technical debt, risk identification and mitigation, quality assurance and deployment strategies including continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines, and rollout and rollback plans. Interviewers evaluate sequencing, prioritization, unblocking teams, managing scope and timelines, measuring and communicating outcomes, and scaling solutions across teams or the organization. Relevant examples include performance optimization, large refactors, platform or infrastructure migrations, adopting new frameworks or tooling, establishing engineering standards, and engineering process improvements. Emphasis is on ownership, influence, cross functional communication, balancing technical excellence with timely delivery, and demonstrable product or business impact.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You're evaluating whether to move from self-hosted Postgres clusters to a managed cloud database. Create a decision framework covering total cost of ownership (including ops time), RPO/RTO differences, security and compliance, migration complexity and downtime risk, vendor lock-in, rollback options, and long-term maintainability considerations.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Given a single SRE and two feature teams with competing priorities, propose a simple prioritization framework to decide when reliability work should preempt feature development. Include inputs (SLO breach probability, incident frequency, business impact), decision rules, a communication protocol, and a suggested percentage of sprint capacity to allocate for reliability.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
You must implement a reliability program that scales across regional teams with different compliance and data residency requirements. Propose a multi-region architectural approach, policy templates (policy-as-code), deployment controls, audit and logging mechanisms, a rollout plan that respects local constraints, and how to maintain consistent global SLOs while honoring regional differences.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design an automated canary and progressive rollout system for multi-region services that includes traffic steering, configurable metrics for gating, automatic rollback, gradual traffic increases, and isolation to prevent cascading failures. Explain architecture choices for metric aggregation, the decision engine, failover behavior, and how to test the system safely.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Define a Service Level Objective (SLO) and an error budget. Explain how you would use them to prioritize engineering work versus operational tasks for an SRE-managed service. Provide a concrete example: pick an SLO, calculate a simple monthly error budget, and describe two scenarios (major new feature launch vs steady-state) showing how you would act based on error budget burn.
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