Technical Foundation and Self Assessment Questions

Covers baseline technical knowledge and the candidate's ability to honestly assess and communicate their technical strengths and weaknesses. Topics include fundamental infrastructure and networking concepts, operating system and protocol basics, core development and platform concepts relevant to the role, and the candidate's candid self evaluation of their depth in specific technologies. Interviewers use this to calibrate how technical the candidate is expected to be, identify areas for growth, and ensure alignment of expectations between product and engineering for collaboration.

MediumTechnical

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Compare cache eviction strategies (LRU, LFU, TTL) and describe how you would size caches and choose eviction policies for a read-heavy API that serves both hot and long-tail content. Discuss cache warm-up, stampede protection, and how you would monitor cache effectiveness.

EasyTechnical

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Compare IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS from a solutions architecture perspective. For a small startup with limited dev-ops resources wanting to ship quickly, which model would you recommend and what are the key trade-offs to explain to the customer's leadership?

HardTechnical

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Your distributed RPC system shows healthy median latency, but 99.99th percentile (p99.99) spikes that regularly cause SLO breaches. Provide a systematic approach to root-cause analysis and a prioritized set of engineering fixes (software and infrastructure) you would recommend to reduce tail latency and prevent regressions.

EasyTechnical

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Explain how database indexes work at a high level (B-tree versus hash indexes) and how indexing choices affect query performance and write throughput. Provide recommendations for OLTP workloads versus analytical (OLAP) queries when advising a customer about schema and index strategy.

EasyTechnical

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Provide a clear, non-code explanation of how TLS secures a client-server connection. Describe the roles of certificates, asymmetric and symmetric cryptography during the handshake, and one practical difference between TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3 that matters to deployment and performance.

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