Interview
Questions
Engineering Management: Reliability and Incidents
Practice leading the response to a serious incident, following through afterward, keeping on-call sustainable, and making the case for reliability work.
Practice these questions directly. An editable copy is yours to change; the original stays unchanged.
Tell me about a serious production incident where you coordinated the response instead of fixing the problem yourself. How did you organize the people involved?
Your on-call engineers are being paged several nights a week, and two of them have told you they are close to burning out. What would you change first?
Two senior engineers on your team disagree about whether to rebuild a fragile service or keep patching it, and both want you to decide. How would you help them reach a sound decision without making it for them?
Your service has used up its error budget for the quarter, and your product partner wants to keep the planned launch date. How would you decide with them whether to pause feature work?
You are paged as incident commander for an outage that has stopped all customers from checking out, and three teams are already debugging in the same channel. What would you do in the first 30 minutes?
After a major incident, the review produces follow-up fixes owned by your team and two others, and none of them fit into anyone's current plans. How would you decide which fixes get done first?