Describe your operations experience and impact
Overview
This question evaluates a candidate's production operations competency, covering on-call practices, incident response and management, SLO/SLI definition and tracking, runbook creation and maintenance, change management, observability and CI/CD tooling, and post-incident analysis within the Behavioral & Leadership category for software engineering interviews. It is commonly asked to verify real-world operational judgment and measurable impact—using metrics like MTTA/MTTR, error rates, latency percentiles, and availability—and primarily tests practical application and leadership in site reliability and incident management rather than purely conceptual understanding.
Operations Experience (Behavioral & Leadership — Technical Screen)
Provide a concise but concrete overview of your production operations experience as a software engineer. Address the following:
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On-call participation
- Rotation model (size, hours, primary/secondary), responsibilities, and page hygiene.
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Incident response and management practices
- Severity definitions, roles (e.g., incident commander), communication, escalation, and tooling.
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SLO/SLI definition and tracking
- Key SLIs, SLO targets, error budget policy, alerting strategy, and reporting cadence.
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Runbook creation and maintenance
- Structure, content, ownership, testing, and where you store them.
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Change management
- Release process, approvals, canary/progressive delivery, rollback, freezes, and risk controls.
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Tooling used
- Observability, alerting/on-call, incident management, CI/CD, change control, and documentation.
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A high-severity incident example
- Your role and decisions, timeline, key actions, resolution, postmortem outcomes, and measurable impact.
Use specific metrics (e.g., MTTA/MTTR, % error rate, latency percentiles, availability) and concrete examples. A STAR structure (Situation, Task, Action, Result) is encouraged.
Solution
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