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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.

MediumTechnical
43 practiced
Describe a plan to reduce infrastructure cost in a large cloud account with diverse teams: account consolidation/labeling, rightsizing, orphaned resource detection, reserved instance/commitment optimization, autoscaling policies, and guardrails to prevent cost regression.
EasySystem Design
62 practiced
Design a highly available, multi-AZ deployment for a typical three-tier web application. Describe components (web tier, app tier, DB), failover strategy, health checks, RTO/RPO targets, and how to test AZ failure scenarios without impacting customers.
EasyTechnical
35 practiced
Design a blue/green deployment strategy for a critical public API that must maintain zero downtime during releases and support safe database schema changes. Describe traffic switching, health checks, how to handle stateful DB migrations, and rollback mechanisms.
HardSystem Design
38 practiced
Architect a globally-distributed storage system that requires strong consistency for metadata and eventual consistency for large object content. The system should support 100M objects and sustained 5k ops/sec ingestion. Describe partitioning, consensus (Raft/Paxos), replication strategy, leader placement, and how you would handle network partitions across regions.
HardTechnical
37 practiced
Provide a detailed postmortem example for a production outage you were involved in. Include timeline, root cause analysis, detection method, mitigation steps taken, quantitative impact (users affected, duration, revenue/latency impacts), long-term fixes, and how you ensured the fix prevented recurrence.

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