Technical Depth Verification Questions
Tests genuine mastery in one or two technical domains claimed by the candidate. Involves deep dives into real world problems the candidate has worked on, the tradeoffs they encountered, architecture and implementation choices, performance and scalability considerations, debugging and failure modes, and lessons learned. The goal is to verify that claimed expertise is substantive rather than superficial by asking follow up questions about specific decisions, alternatives considered, and measurable outcomes.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
You need to verify that a StatefulSet on Kubernetes fails over correctly when the leader pod is killed. Describe how you would implement automated leader-failover tests including readiness/liveness probes, pod disruption budgets, anti-affinity rules, and steps to measure failover correctness and time-to-restore. Include safe teardown steps to avoid production impact.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain the difference between SLA, SLO, and SLI. Suppose you operate a public REST API with a 30-day 99.95% availability SLO (30 days = 43,200 minutes). Calculate the allowable downtime in minutes and seconds. Then describe a concrete SLI you would implement for this API (including success and latency criteria), how you would measure it, and propose an error-budget policy that ties alerts, launch freezes, and triage actions to budget consumption.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You implemented a distributed lock service atop Paxos. Provide a correctness sketch that argues mutual exclusion and liveness under node failures. State your assumptions (clock synchronization, lease timeouts), invariants the system maintains, and how your implementation enforces them (quorums, leases, renewals).
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
A production Linux server shows sustained 95% CPU utilization. Describe the step-by-step diagnostic commands and strategies you would use to determine whether CPU usage is due to user-space processes, kernel activity, I/O wait, or interrupt storms. Include specific tools and what output you would inspect (e.g., top/htop, pidstat, perf, strace, /proc, sar).
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You led the post-incident forensic analysis after a production security breach caused by leaked credentials. Walk through the timeline you would reconstruct, what evidence you would collect (logs, memory dumps, network captures), how you would determine the initial vector, steps to remediate and rotate secrets, and how to validate that the attacker no longer has access.
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