Testing, Quality & Reliability Topics
Quality assurance, testing methodologies, test automation, and reliability engineering. Includes QA frameworks, accessibility testing, quality metrics, and incident response from a reliability/engineering perspective. Covers testing strategies, risk-based testing, test case development, UAT, and quality transformations. Excludes operational incident management at scale (see 'Enterprise Operations & Incident Management').
System Reliability and Availability
Assess the candidate's approach to designing and operating highly reliable business critical systems. Topics include defining service level agreements and service level objectives, capacity planning, fault tolerance and redundancy strategies, high availability architecture patterns, load balancing and traffic management, monitoring and observability design, alerting and on call practices, incident detection and response, structured root cause analysis and post incident action tracking, reliability testing and chaos experiments, and continuous improvement processes to reduce downtime and improve recoverability. Interviewers may probe trade offs between cost and redundancy, how reliability targets are set with stakeholders, and examples of measurable improvements.
Reliability and Operational Excellence
Covers design and operational practices for building and running reliable software systems and for achieving operational maturity. Topics include defining, measuring, and using Service Level Objectives, Service Level Indicators, and Service Level Agreements; establishing error budget policies and reliability governance; measuring incident impact and using error budgets to prioritize work. Also includes architectural and operational techniques such as redundancy, failover, graceful degradation, disaster recovery, capacity planning, resilience patterns, and technical debt management to improve availability at scale. Operational practices covered include observability, monitoring, alerting, runbooks, incident response and post incident analysis, release gating, and reliability driven prioritization. Proactive resilience practices such as fault injection and chaos engineering, as well as trade offs between reliability, cost, and development velocity and scaling reliability practices across teams and organizations, are included to capture both hands on and senior level discussions.
Monitoring Tools and Observability
Covers hands on familiarity with modern monitoring and observability platforms and the practices for instrumenting and operating production systems. Candidates should be able to describe one or more tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, and explain how to write queries, design dashboards, and configure alerts. Include understanding of metrics collection, time series databases, log aggregation, distributed tracing, and common query languages used by these platforms. Also cover integrating monitoring with incident management systems such as PagerDuty and Opsgenie, defining service level indicators and objectives, setting alerting thresholds to reduce noise, and using dashboards and alerts to troubleshoot performance and availability issues.
Reliability Observability and Incident Response
Covers designing, building, and operating systems to be reliable, observable, and resilient, together with the operational practices for detecting, responding to, and learning from incidents. Instrumentation and observability topics include selecting and defining meaningful metrics and service level objectives and service level agreements, time series collection, dashboards, structured and contextual logs, distributed tracing, and sampling strategies. Monitoring and alerting topics cover setting effective alert thresholds to avoid alert fatigue, anomaly detection, alert routing and escalation, and designing signals that indicate degraded operation or regional failures. Reliability and fault tolerance topics include redundancy, replication, retries with idempotency, circuit breakers, bulkheads, graceful degradation, health checks, automatic failover, canary deployments, progressive rollbacks, capacity planning, disaster recovery and business continuity planning, backups, and data integrity practices such as validation and safe retry semantics. Operational and incident response practices include on call practices, runbooks and runbook automation, incident command and coordination, containment and mitigation steps, root cause analysis and blameless post mortems, tracking and implementing action items, chaos engineering and fault injection to validate resilience, and continuous improvement and cultural practices that support rapid recovery and learning. Candidates are expected to reason about trade offs between reliability, velocity, and cost and to describe architectural and operational patterns that enable rapid diagnosis, safe deployments, and operability at scale.
Service Level Agreements and Management
Covers the end to end practice of defining, negotiating, operating, monitoring, and improving formal service level agreements and related internal service level objectives. Candidates should be able to translate customer and business requirements into measurable commitments such as response time, resolution time, system availability, and quality targets; write clear and testable agreement clauses; and negotiate realistic targets with customers and internal stakeholders. Topics include methods for measuring and monitoring adherence using instrumentation, metrics, dashboards, real time monitoring, and trend reporting; alerting and escalation procedures; forecasting capacity and staffing to prevent breaches; incident remediation plans when targets are not met; and communication strategies for informing customers and internal teams when commitments are at risk or have been violated. Also assess understanding of the operational impact of service level targets on team prioritization and resourcing, trade offs between meeting time based metrics and ensuring quality outcomes, interactions between external service level agreements and internal service level objectives, and continuous improvement practices to reduce breaches and improve reliability.