#reliability

9 reliability interview questions, asked at Amazon, Anthropic, Databricks and 6 more companies. Last asked Sep 2026.

Design a distributed power grid control systemSystem designMonitor and control generators, substations and loads across a power grid, reacting to failures and demand changes in seconds, safely, even when parts of the network are cut off.
Last asked Sep 2026
Design reliable command delivery between autonomous vehicles and the cloudSystem designDesign how commands are sent between the cloud and a fleet of autonomous vehicles (and acknowledgements back), so a command is delivered and acted on exactly as intended even with…
Last asked Aug 2026
Design an order relay service in front of a broker APISystem designClients send buy and sell orders with a deadline to your service, which forwards them to a third-party broker, tracks each order until it fills, and cancels whatever has not…
Last asked Apr 2026
Design reliable sign-in on top of a flaky token providerSystem designClients get a token from a third-party auth server and present it to your main server. The third-party server is unreliable: requests fail sometimes, and sometimes it answers with…
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
Debug an overloaded Kubernetes clusterSystem designAn infrastructure round: a service running on Kubernetes is overloaded. Say which metrics you want to see first; the interviewer draws them for you, and you narrow the cause down…
Last asked Aug 2025
Design fault-tolerant training for a frontier model on 16k acceleratorsSystem designA 400B-parameter model trains on about 16,000 accelerators for two months. At that scale hardware fails every few hours and each failure stops the synchronous job. Design the…
Design review: rolling out a new model versionAI system designYou are reviewing a launch plan written by the serving team. Critique it: rank the risks, propose changes, and say what must be true before you would approve it. You have 45…
Design a real-time air traffic control systemSystem designTrack every aircraft in a region from radar and transponder feeds, predict conflicts, and alert controllers within a second, with no single point of failure.