Technical Innovation and Modernization Questions

Covers leading and executing technical change that raises the engineering bar while preserving operational stability. Topics include identifying and prioritizing innovation opportunities, sponsoring research and experimentation, running proofs of concept and pilots, and introducing new tools or frameworks. Also includes strategies for modernizing legacy systems and architecture with minimal business disruption, managing technical debt, migration planning, rollback and cutover approaches, and maintaining reliability and continuity. Evaluated skills include optimizing performance and cost at scale, establishing engineering standards and best practices, governance and risk management, stakeholder alignment and communication, measuring impact and return on investment, and balancing long term innovation with short term pragmatism.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Define technical debt in the context of a large-scale distributed system. Explain types of technical debt (design, code, build, test, and architectural), how each type impacts reliability, velocity, and operational cost in a microservices environment, and give concrete examples where technical debt caused outages or slowed feature delivery.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain eventual consistency in distributed systems and contrast it with strong consistency. Provide three real-world scenarios where eventual consistency is acceptable (e.g., social feeds, analytics) and two scenarios where strong consistency is required (e.g., money transfers). Discuss client-visible implications like stale reads and ordering guarantees.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

After modernizing several services, the global API layer must handle 500k RPS. Propose optimizations to control cost while maintaining performance: multi-layer caching strategies, batching/aggregation, protocol choices, resource sizing, autoscaling strategies, and the trade-offs each optimization introduces.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

How would you mentor and incentivize engineering teams to adopt newly established architectural standards and best practices across squads, without creating bottlenecks or resentment? Include tactics for onboarding, measuring adoption, recognizing contributors, and handling exceptions.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Implement server-side idempotency handling for HTTP POST requests in Java (pseudocode is fine). Requirements: accept an Idempotency-Key header, store the outcome for a configurable TTL, handle concurrent duplicate requests correctly, and return the saved response when a duplicate is detected.

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