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# engineering process

// [27] real interview questions. Answers and sources live in the practice app.

practice this topic
  1. Walk me through how a task goes from idea to production on your team.(mid)
  2. What branching strategy do you prefer — trunk-based development or long-lived feature branches — and why?(mid)
  3. What did CI/CD look like on your last team? What would you change about it?(mid)
  4. Walk me through a typical sprint on your team. Which ceremonies actually earned their time?(mid)
  5. How do you estimate work, and what do you do when the estimate turns out to be wrong?(mid)
  6. Tell me about a production incident you caused or were on the hook for. What happened afterward?(senior)
  7. What is a blameless postmortem, and why do strong teams insist on it?(mid)
  8. How do you monitor a service in production? What do you alert on?(mid)
  9. What makes an on-call rotation healthy? How would you fix a bad one?(senior)
  10. How do you decide when to pay down technical debt versus shipping features?(senior)
  11. How do you identify the riskiest parts of a codebase?(senior)
  12. How do you record and communicate architectural decisions?(mid)
  13. A critical vulnerability is announced in one of your dependencies. Walk me through what you do.(mid)
  14. What should developer documentation cover, and how do you keep it from going stale?(junior)
  15. A new teammate needs three days to get a working local development environment. Is that a problem, and what would you do about it?(mid)
  16. Why keep infrastructure under version control as code?(mid)
  17. How do you track and triage bugs?(junior)
  18. Your team is split on a technical decision and consensus has stalled. How do you resolve it?(senior)
  19. Everything on your plate is marked urgent. How do you decide what to actually work on?(mid)
  20. Which incidents deserve a formal postmortem?(mid)
  21. Your team writes postmortems, but the same classes of incident keep recurring. What is broken?(senior)
  22. How would you introduce a postmortem culture to a team that has none?(senior)
  23. Your team spends hours every sprint on planning poker. Is that time well spent?(senior)
  24. Your team misses a release target. What should happen in the days after?(mid)
  25. You are asked to design the onboarding for new engineers joining your team. What does it include?(mid)
  26. How should a team evaluate and adopt a new technology?(mid)
  27. Your team becomes remote-first. Which engineering practices have to change?(mid)