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Systems and Infrastructure Experience Questions

Describe and analyze your hands on experience designing, operating, and maintaining infrastructure and systems. Candidates should be prepared with three to four concrete examples of systems or infrastructure projects they directly contributed to, including quantitative scale metrics such as user counts, requests per second, data volumes, throughput, and geographic distribution. Discuss architecture decisions and trade offs, component choices, platform boundaries, and how the design met requirements for scalability, reliability, performance, and security. Cover operational aspects such as deployments, configuration management, automation and infrastructure as code, monitoring and observability, incident response and remediation, capacity planning, and disaster recovery and business continuity. Include experience with large scale and multi region deployments, data center operations, networking at scale, and integration points. Also cover enterprise information technology topics where relevant, for example servers and endpoints, storage systems, networking hardware, identity and access infrastructure such as Active Directory, firewalls, routers and switches, and the differences and migration considerations between on premise and cloud infrastructure. Be ready to explain specific challenges faced, how issues were diagnosed and resolved, trade offs made, and the candidate's exact role and contributions.

EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain the differences between SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs. Give concrete examples for a web API (what SLI you would pick), an appropriate SLO target for production, and what contractual elements an SLA would include. Discuss how you would derive SLO targets from user-impact and business constraints.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Describe how you would partition and shard a high-throughput time-series database for telemetry ingestion (1M points/sec). Cover ingestion path, write-ahead logs, compaction, retention policies, query patterns for analytics, and cost trade-offs between storage types.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Discuss multi-cloud architecture strategies (active-active, active-passive, or cloud-specific services). Explain the operational complexity, data gravity issues, cost implications, and how you'd handle cross-cloud networking, monitoring, and failover. Provide criteria for when multi-cloud is justified.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Your company has a single-region core service and plans to expand to multi-region. Describe a migration strategy that includes data replication choices (async vs sync), DNS cutover, schema considerations, user session routing, and rollback plan for each phase of the migration.
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a global API tier to serve 1M daily active users where peak traffic can reach ~100k requests/sec. Define edge strategy (CDN, caching), API gateway features (rate-limiting, auth), region placement, data partitioning, and failure isolation to meet availability and latency targets.

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