Complex Technical System Learning Questions

Ability to rapidly learn and build correct mental models of large, unfamiliar technical systems and architectures. Candidates should be able to explain their process for onboarding to a codebase or system, including reading architecture and design documents, inspecting diagrams and code paths, using runtime observation and traces, running simple experiments, and asking targeted questions of engineers and stakeholders. Assessment topics include distributed systems fundamentals and tradeoffs such as consistency and availability choices, scalability and partitioning patterns, microservices boundaries, event driven and asynchronous processing, failure modes and recovery strategies, caching, replication, and observability and monitoring. At senior or staff levels, expectations include synthesizing and documenting system knowledge, communicating complexity to diverse audiences, identifying documentation gaps, creating onboarding guides, leading architecture walkthroughs, and mentoring others to understand the system.