Interview
Questions
System Design Behavioral Interview Questions
Behavioral questions about architectural decisions, technical leadership, and system design tradeoffs. For senior/staff engineers who need to explain the "why" behind technical choices.
Tell me about a system you designed that had to scale significantly. What did you anticipate correctly and what surprised you?
Describe a significant production incident you were involved in. How did you diagnose and resolve it?
Tell me about a time you had to make a trade-off between consistency and availability in a distributed system.
Describe a system you designed that failed to scale as expected. What did you learn?
Tell me about a database schema decision that had long-term implications for your system.
Describe a situation where you had to deprecate or sunset a system. How did you manage the migration?
How do you approach technical debt versus new feature development? Give me an example.
Tell me about a time you had to design APIs that would be consumed by other teams. How did you approach it?
Describe a time you inherited a poorly designed system. How did you approach understanding and improving it?
How do you approach documenting architectural decisions? Give me an example where documentation helped.
Tell me about an architectural decision you strongly disagreed with. How did you handle it?
Describe a time you had to balance performance with maintainability in your design choices.