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Incident Management and Response Questions

Covers operational handling of production outages and service incidents across the full lifecycle from preparation through detection, triage, containment, mitigation, recovery, and post incident review. Interviewers assess monitoring and observability signals, alerting thresholds and on call rotation, severity classification and escalation paths, incident command and coordination, runbooks and playbooks, immediate containment and mitigation techniques to minimize customer impact, restoration and recovery procedures, and evidence capture when relevant. Candidates should be able to describe root cause analysis practices, blameless post incident reviews, tracking remediation and follow up actions, driving cross functional ownership of fixes, and how incident learnings feed into long term reliability improvements and tooling or automation. Senior level expectations include organizing incident response teams for production reliability, defining severity levels and escalation policies, balancing rapid decisions with risk management, and continuously improving processes, runbooks, and instrumentation.

MediumTechnical
56 practiced
An hourly ETL failed mid-run leaving partially written partitions for several recent hours. Downstream consumers expect stable reads. Describe a safe recovery sequence: how to identify affected partitions, snapshot state, safely delete or mark partial partitions, re-run ingestion, and validate. Mention SQL patterns or transactions to preserve atomicity where available.
MediumTechnical
101 practiced
Implement a Python generator dedupe_alerts(stream) that accepts a stream of alert events (each with timestamp, metric, tags, value) and yields only unique alerts within a 5-minute sliding window based on a fingerprint of metric+sorted tags. Ensure memory remains bounded and explain how you evict old entries.
HardTechnical
49 practiced
You detect inconsistent aggregates between OLAP analytics and OLTP transactional systems that suggest missing events. Provide a methodical approach to identify whether the problem originated at the source (event producer), streaming ingestion, batch processing, or query/reporting layer. Include sample SQL queries, checksum strategies, and log/offset checks you would use.
HardTechnical
52 practiced
Implement a Python class BackfillEngine that accepts a list of partitions and a process_partition(partition) callback. The engine must persist checkpoints to a storage interface so it can resume after failure, and guarantee idempotent behavior so re-running does not produce duplicate writes. Sketch the class API, important implementation details for atomic checkpoints, and how to adapt it to run distributed workers safely.
HardTechnical
71 practiced
Case study: A data pipeline has silently corrupted billing metrics for the past 3 months. As incident lead, describe immediate containment to stop further corruption, forensic steps to determine exact affected time ranges and root cause, required legal/compliance notifications, remediation and backfill strategy for affected customers, and post-incident priorities to regain trust.

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