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.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Scenario: A customer-facing API exhibits periodic spikes in p99 and p999 latency, alerts trigger but the issue does not reproduce in staging. Walk through your investigative process: what telemetry you collect, which hypotheses you form (network, hotspot code paths, GC, DB locks, cold caches), how you test hypotheses safely in production (sampling, canaries), and how you coordinate with SRE, DBAs, and product owners during the incident.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Design a tabletop exercise agenda to test cross-team communication, decision-making, and escalation for a simulated data center power outage affecting core services. Include roles to play, timeline of injects, success criteria, observers, required artifacts (runbooks, contact lists), and immediate post-exercise follow-ups.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
How do you decide when to declare a major incident versus treating an event as a local issue? Provide decision criteria, stakeholders to notify at each escalation level, and examples of internal and customer notification templates for a SaaS product.
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Design an incident escalation and communication plan for a global SaaS product that operates 24/7 across multiple time zones. Include roles and responsibilities (who convenes the war room), notification channels and templates, RACI for different severity levels, expected response SLAs per role, and a sample external communication template for customers.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
A cascading failure occurs: one service begins queuing requests, upstream services retry aggressively, and the database becomes overloaded causing a global outage. Provide an immediate containment plan, identify long-term architecture changes to prevent recurrence (for example circuit breakers, backpressure, throttling, quotas), and describe how you would present the root cause and action plan to the C-suite focusing on business impact and required investment.
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