Technical Risk Assessment and Mitigation Questions
Technical risk assessment and mitigation covers systematically identifying, prioritizing, and addressing potential failure modes and implementation pitfalls across architecture, integration, data migration, scalability, performance, security, third party dependencies, and team skill gaps. Candidates should demonstrate methods for analyzing and categorizing risks, such as fault tree analysis and failure mode and effects analysis, and describe practical mitigations including staged rollouts, canary deployments, redundancy and failover, rollback and contingency plans, increased testing, capacity planning, security hardening, monitoring and observability, runbooks, and training or vendor support. Interviewers expect discussion of validation strategies for mitigations, including dry runs, experiments, load and performance testing, chaos engineering, staged deployments, and monitoring driven verification before full production release. Strong answers will show how to prioritize by likelihood and impact, trade off cost and schedule, define measurable success criteria, and iterate on mitigations based on operational feedback.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Describe how feature flags (feature toggles) reduce deployment risk in a microservices environment. Explain types of flags (release, ops, experiment), strategies for naming and lifecycle management, techniques for safe cleanup, and how to use flags for rapid rollback and staged rollouts.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Design a backwards-and-forwards compatible rollout plan to migrate authentication tokens from opaque tokens to JWT across hundreds of microservices. Explain token issuance, dual-acceptance during migration, revocation strategies, telemetry to detect mixed traffic, and how to minimize security exposure during the transition.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
A third-party payment processor handles 80% of your transactions and experiences intermittent failures during peak hours. Architect a mitigation plan to reduce customer impact without replacing the provider: include routing/fallback logic, parallelization or queuing, async retries with deduplication, and a reconciliation process to ensure financial correctness.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You're on a sales call discussing a 6-month cutover timeline. You identify several technical risks likely to delay delivery (integration complexity, data migration, third-party readiness). How do you communicate these prioritized risks and mitigations to the customer and internal sales team while preserving trust and deal momentum? Provide phrasing and negotiation strategies you would use.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Compare canary deployments, blue-green deployments, and rolling updates for microservices. For each approach discuss how it mitigates deployment risk, ideal use-cases, the monitoring checks you would run to determine success, and practical rollback triggers.
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