Technical Problem Solving and Ownership Questions

Covers the ability to diagnose, triage, and resolve complex technical problems end to end while demonstrating personal ownership. Candidates should show deep technical reasoning about system architecture, integration complexity, data migration considerations, and custom configuration trade offs. Expect discussion of root cause analysis, diagnostic techniques, reproducible debugging, and risk mitigation strategies. Candidates should be able to explain design trade offs, propose practical solutions, assess business impact, and describe collaboration with stakeholders and cross functional teams. Emphasis should be placed on concrete actions the candidate took, how they prioritized options, and the measurable results and lessons learned.

HardSystem Design

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System design / operations (hard): You must perform a zero-downtime migration of a 2TB table for a service with high write throughput across multiple regions. Describe a complete strategy including dual-write or expand-contract pattern, chunked backfill approach, consistency verification, how to handle replicas and failovers, rollback plan, monitoring, and estimated validation time. Consider RPO/RTO constraints and bandwidth/cost trade-offs.

MediumSystem Design

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System design (medium): Design a runbook automation service that allows teams to register idempotent remediation scripts (playbooks), execute them during incidents via a web UI or API, capture outputs, require role-based approvals for risky actions, integrate with Slack and PagerDuty, and persist audit logs for compliance. Sketch components, data model for runbooks, safety controls, authentication/authorization, and how you would test and stage runbooks before production use.

HardTechnical

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Problem solving / forensics (hard): A buggy release introduced silent data corruption across multiple services (e.g., truncated JSON payloads saved to DB). Describe an end-to-end forensic investigation plan: how to detect and quantify affected records, preserve evidence, design a safe backfill or repair process (idempotent and retry-safe), communicate the impact to stakeholders, and prevent recurrence through testing and monitoring.

EasyTechnical

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List and explain five observability metrics and signals you would check first when a service's latency suddenly increases. For each metric, explain what a relevant alert or threshold might look like and what immediate diagnostic evidence you would expect to see in logs/traces for each metric.

EasyTechnical

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Explain Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). For a web payment service, propose RTO/RPO targets for three tiers of features: critical transactions, user profile updates, and analytics jobs. Describe how you would test and validate RTO/RPO periodically and what tooling/metrics you would rely on (e.g., backups, replication lag, failover tests).

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