On Call and Production Readiness Questions

Comprehensive operational topic covering the responsibilities, processes, and practices involved in supporting production systems and managing incidents. Candidates should be able to describe on call scheduling models and burden distribution across teams, expected incident volume and typical severity levels, incident triage steps and severity assessment to prioritize and escalate appropriately, and criteria for involving security teams or external vendors. It includes monitoring and alerting strategy, alert thresholds and noise reduction, service level objectives and service level indicators, and tooling for incident management. Candidates should also be able to explain runbooks and playbooks for common incident types, hands on troubleshooting during live incidents, root cause analysis approaches, deployment and rollback practices, and measures to reduce mean time to detection and mean time to recovery. The topic also covers incident communication practices, escalation procedures, post incident activities such as blameless postmortems and follow up actions for continuous improvement, and considerations about allocation of time between maintenance and feature work to preserve production readiness.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Describe the process and escalation path for a Sev1 incident in an enterprise: list roles (incident commander, communications lead, triage engineers, exec liaison), initial responsibilities, expected timelines for first response and containment, and when to escalate to a war room or executive briefing.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Write clear, language-agnostic pseudocode for a circuit breaker around calls to a downstream service. Include states (closed, open, half-open), failure counting using a sliding window, an exponential backoff for retry attempts, and the success path to transition back to closed. Mention thread-safety and idempotency considerations.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Describe a concrete plan to measure and reduce Mean Time To Detection (MTTD) for a microservice over a quarter. Include instrumentation changes, alert routing improvements, synthetic checks vs real-user metrics, dashboards, and an experiment you would run to validate improvement.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Describe common on-call scheduling models (rotation, follow-the-sun, pager escalation, primary/secondary). For each model, list one advantage and one drawback, and explain which model you'd choose for a small startup with 10 engineers versus a global enterprise with 500 engineers and 24/7 customers.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

During a suspected data breach, describe the steps you would take to preserve forensic evidence in production: what data to capture (memory dumps, process lists, logs, network captures), how to prioritize captures to minimize service disruption, chain-of-custody considerations, and how to coordinate these actions with security and legal teams.

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