Error Handling and Operational Resilience Questions

Design and implement error handling and resilience patterns for backend services and distributed systems. Covers distinguishing transient from permanent failures, retry logic with exponential backoff and jitter, timeout and cancellation handling, idempotent operations and safe replays, graceful degradation and fallback behavior, circuit breaker patterns, testing failure modes through chaos engineering, and using telemetry and alerting to detect and automatically recover from faults. Interviewers assess whether the candidate anticipates failure modes and builds resilient behavior into code and operational procedures, regardless of the specific stack or platform involved.