Problem Solving and Learning from Failure Questions
Combines technical or domain problem solving with reflective learning after unsuccessful attempts. Candidates should describe the troubleshooting or investigative approach they used, hypothesis generation and testing, obstacles encountered, mitigation versus long term fixes, and how the failure informed future processes or system designs. This topic often appears in incident or security contexts where the expectation is to explain technical steps, coordination across teams, lessons captured, and concrete improvements implemented to prevent recurrence.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
You inherit an on-call rota where incidents frequently escalate to engineering leads after midnight. Describe the immediate operational changes, short-term automation, and policy adjustments you would make to reduce unnecessary wake-ups while ensuring critical issues are handled. Explain how you would measure success over the first 30 and 90 days.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Alert thresholds were tuned against a stable baseline but seasonal traffic now causes many false positives. Propose an architecture and process to auto-tune alerts using adaptive baselining or ML-based anomaly detection, while ensuring that critical alerts are not suppressed and humans can audit and override the logic.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
How would you structure experiments and production-safe diagnostics to find an intermittent data corruption bug that appears only under high load and cannot be reproduced in staging? Include test harness design considerations, additional logging or checks, sampling strategies, canary approaches, and verification criteria before deploying a fix.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Explain how to implement an SLO program that balances engineering velocity and operational reliability. Give examples of SLOs and error budgets appropriate for a checkout API, describe an error budget burn policy, and show how the policy would affect deployment decisions and rollback criteria.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
How would you quantify and present the business impact of an outage to prioritize remediation work? List the specific metrics you would collect (example: revenue lost per minute, customers affected, SLA breaches, support ticket spike), the data sources for each metric, and how you would present this to engineering and sales stakeholders to influence prioritization.
Unlock Full Question Bank
Get access to hundreds of Problem Solving and Learning from Failure interview questions and detailed answers.
Sign in to ContinueJoin thousands of developers preparing for their dream job.