#observability

9 observability interview questions, asked at Google, Amazon, Anthropic and 5 more companies. Last asked Sep 2026.

Design a telemetry pipeline that reconciles inconsistent metric namesSystem designA large fleet of client software already in the field sends telemetry to a data infrastructure team. Each record carries a telemetryname saying what it measures (a request…
Last asked Sep 2026
Latency got worse right after a deploy: what do you do?System designA new version went out and 10 to 15 minutes later latency or reliability is degrading. Explain how you would notice, how you decide whether to roll back right away or investigate…
Last asked Sep 2026
Recruiter screen with an AI interviewer: distributed systems experience and production debuggingBehavioralA short first screen run by an AI interviewer that asks questions quickly. Expect: 1. Your project experience with the stack in the job description (Go, Java, Spark…
Last asked Sep 2026
Data platform and pipeline operations deep diveSystem designAfter a short coding warm-up, discuss running production data pipelines: streaming ingestion, metrics and alerting, idempotent reprocessing, batch jobs on Spark, and how you keep…
Last asked Jul 2026
Speed up object-backed APIs, then design LLM observabilityAI system designTwo parts. First, make slow API endpoints whose data lives in stored objects faster. Then design an observability platform for LLM applications: capturing traces of model calls…
Last asked Jun 2026
Design a core dump collection and analysis systemSystem designDesign a system that collects core dumps from crashing processes across a fleet of machines, stores them, and helps engineers analyze them.
Last asked Jun 2026
Design automated anomaly detection and remediation for cloud servicesML designDesign a platform that watches metrics and logs across many cloud services, detects anomalies, and responds automatically where it is safe (restart, roll back, scale) while paging…
Last asked Sep 2025
SLIs, SLOs and SLAs, then a monitoring designSystem designExplain the difference between SLIs, SLOs and SLAs with an example service. Then design its monitoring: which indicators you measure, how you set targets and error budgets, what…
Last asked Sep 2025
Alert routing service with silences and escalationCodingBuild the routing core of an alerting service. The monitoring system calls fire(labels, now) for an active alert on every evaluation cycle (every 30 seconds or so) and…