Interview panel template for small teams.

The questions.

1. 01

   situational hard · dates-vs-quality

   Your CEO commits you to a public launch date your team can't safely hit. Walk me through what you say to them.

   Strong answer

   Separates date concern from reputation concern. Proposes options (scope cut, phased rollout, extended beta). Doesn't just say no. Seniors: surfaces trade-offs so the CEO chooses.

   Weak answer

   Either agrees and burns out the team, or refuses outright without offering alternatives.
2. 02

   technical baseline · concurrency

   How do you handle concurrent writes to the same resource (e.g., two users editing the same document)?

   Strong answer

   Names a specific strategy — optimistic locking, CRDTs, operational transform, or last-write-wins with explicit trade-off discussion. Mentions how they'd expose conflicts to the user.

   Weak answer

   Hand-waves about 'locks.' Doesn't distinguish optimistic vs pessimistic. No user-facing conflict resolution.
3. 03

   situational medium · incident-response

   It's Saturday 11pm. A loan-disbursal job is failing silently. The team that built it no longer exists. Walk me through what you do in the next hour and next 48 hours.

   Strong answer

   First hour: triage scope + comms to right people + restore service before root-causing. Next 48h: postmortem, takes ownership of the service, suggests durable change to prevent silent failures.

   Weak answer

   Stops at 'check the logs.' No comms plan. Next 48h is 'fix the bug.'
4. 04

   communication baseline · explaining

   Explain why ACID transactions matter to a non-technical co-founder asking 'can't we just use a NoSQL database?'

   Strong answer

   Concrete examples (double-charging, lost orders). No jargon drop. Acknowledges valid NoSQL use cases. Seniors: helps them think, doesn't just explain.

   Weak answer

   Jumps to CAP theorem. Condescending tone. Doesn't engage with the question as asked.
5. 05

   culture medium · candor

   Your manager proposes a technical direction you think is wrong. Three other senior engineers nod along. What do you say in the meeting, and what do you do in the next 48 hours?

   Strong answer

   Speaks up in the meeting (even tentatively). Grounds disagreement in reasoning, not ego. Follows up in writing. Separates 'disagree' from 'won't execute.'

   Weak answer

   Stays silent in meeting, vents to a peer later. Or raises it aggressively without offering an alternative.
6. 06

   technical medium · api-design

   You're designing an API endpoint that returns a user's feed. Pagination strategy? Why?

   Strong answer

   Discusses cursor vs offset-based pagination · knows when each is appropriate · mentions stability under inserts · sets sensible default + max page size · considers ETag/If-None-Match for caching.

   Weak answer

   Picks offset pagination by default without considering stability. No max page size. No caching thought.
7. 07

   experience baseline · resume-probe

   You mentioned leading a migration to microservices. Team size, hardest thing that broke, what you'd do differently today?

   Strong answer

   Concrete numbers. Specific non-generic failure. 'Differently' shows updated thinking (not just 'hired sooner').

   Weak answer

   Paraphrases the resume. Vague failure. 'Differently' is generic.
8. 08

   technical hard · scaling

   Walk me through how you'd scale a write-heavy service from 100 to 10,000 writes/sec. What breaks first?

   Strong answer

   Starts with profiling current bottleneck, not with 'add Kafka.' Acknowledges write-amplification, index bloat, replication lag. Discusses shard keys + hot-partition mitigation.

   Weak answer

   Jumps to 'we'd add a queue and scale horizontally' without identifying where the current bottleneck is.
9. 09

   technical baseline · postgres

   You have a Postgres table with 500M rows of loan applications. A query filtering by applicant_id (indexed) and status (not indexed) takes 3 seconds. Walk me through how you'd diagnose and fix this.

   Strong answer

   Asks about workload before jumping to solutions · proposes EXPLAIN ANALYZE · mentions partial or composite indexes, not just 'add an index' · seniors reference statistics, vacuum, or plan cache unprompted.

   Weak answer

   Immediately says 'add an index on status.' Doesn't ask about cardinality. Doesn't mention the query planner.
10. 10

    situational medium · teammate-conflict

    A teammate ships a change you think is wrong after the fact. Already in production. What do you say, what do you do?

    Strong answer

    Separates the product concern from the relationship concern. 1:1 first. Focuses on systemic change (PR review, tests) — not on blame.

    Weak answer

    Avoids the conversation or jumps to escalation. Assigns blame. No systemic improvement suggested.