Loading...
Startups and scale-ups, senior. 31 questions across 7 blocks, about 16 hr of work.
There is no calibration to hide behind, so the loop is whatever the founder or lead believes predicts performance - most often a practical build, then a conversation about the trade-offs you chose. Breadth is the bar: the same person is expected to ship the feature, its migration, its metrics, and its on-call. Behavioural rounds are less about principles than about tolerance for ambiguity and whether you make decisions when nobody hands you the requirement.
Front-load breadth, put the two hardest rounds mid-week when you still have time to react to a bad session, and keep the last evening for a timed loop and your stories. Two hours a night done every night beats one eight-hour Saturday, because retrieval improves with spacing and a single long session mostly produces the feeling of having worked.
Read the sheets for the core sections of this track at speed. Mark the items you could not answer; they become your revision list all week.
Write down requests per day, input tokens per request and expected output tokens, multiply by the provider's per-million rates, then test each assumption. Output tokens cost several times input, retries and agent loops multiply the input, and a cached prefix rewrites the arithmetic.
Return a strong ETag on GET, require If-Match on writes, and reject a stale token with 412 Precondition Failed so a lost update becomes a visible error rather than silent data loss. What makes it correct is that the comparison and the write must be one atomic operation - an UPDATE guarded by the version in its WHERE clause - because a SELECT then UPDATE reintroduces the race.
Roughly 200 near-full copies, because delta compression works on text and a relinked binary differs throughout, so each version costs almost its own size. Deleting the file changes nothing: history is content-addressed and every past commit still reaches the blob. The design fix is that build outputs belong in a registry that can expire them, because version control is built never to forget.
The stack and concept questions this loop opens with. Answer before reading, and note which probes you missed rather than whether you got it right.
Indirect prompt injection is when instructions hidden in content the model reads are followed as if they came from you. Instructions and data share one token sequence, so there is no complete fix and the defence is architectural: least-privilege tools, filtered output, and human approval for side effects. It also connects llm security to the point an interviewer is testing.
A saga has no rollback. Each step already committed in its own database and was visible to everyone, so you can only run new forward transactions that semantically offset it. Compensations are not atomic, some actions cannot be compensated at all, and compensations themselves fail - so a saga needs idempotent handlers and an ordering rule for irreversible steps.
CPU is compressible, so the kubelet throttles it rather than evicting for it. Eviction comes from memory, ephemeral storage or inodes - and which pods die is decided by QoS class, not by who caused the pressure. Check node conditions and eviction thresholds first, then fix the requests and limits so critical workloads are Guaranteed rather than BestEffort.
The dialog was built as a styled div, so nothing marks the rest of the page inert. Focus was never moved in, never constrained, never restored on close, and Escape was never wired. A correct dialog moves focus in, keeps it in, restores it, marks background inert and is labelled - which native dialog with showModal gives you almost for free.
Decide from evidence, not intuition: per-index scan counts read against the date the statistics were reset, redundancy judged by leading columns, and the constraints and foreign keys that need an index whether or not anything ever scans them. Then make the drop reversible.
Whiteboard each one for real, on paper, before you look. A design answer you have only read is one you cannot produce under questioning.
Subtract the answer reservation and the fixed prompt first, give retrieval a token allowance rather than a passage count, and let conversation history have what remains under an explicit eviction policy - because history is the only term that grows every turn while everything else stays flat.
Permission data is as privileged as the code that reads it, so a bulk write to it needs the same review, staged rollout and reversibility as a deploy. Derive grants from a source of truth rather than stamping them, assert tenant invariants continuously, and know how long a cached decision keeps the mistake alive.
Build one immutable artefact, promote that same artefact through environments behind ordered quality gates, and deploy so traffic can be shifted back instantly. Rollback only stays possible if schema changes are backward-compatible expand-contract steps decoupled from the code deploy.
Revoke once in the authorisation store, then propagate to the index ACLs, every cache holding text or results, any derived summaries and embeddings, and the conversation transcripts still carrying passages. Answers already delivered cannot be recalled, so the guarantee you offer is a bounded window rather than erasure.
The rounds where there is no correct answer, only a defensible one. State your assumptions out loud; that is what is being scored.
Harvest cases from real inputs and past incidents rather than inventing them, record for every case why it exists and what failure it guards, separate deterministic assertions from graded quality, and freeze a regression slice you never tune against.
Assess the candidate's understanding of advanced priority inversion scenarios in RTOS environments, focusing on chained resources, priority inheritance protocols, and interrupt synchronisation.
Evaluate the candidate's expertise in profiling build systems, configuring distributed caching, and optimising CI/CD pipelines for large-scale mobile projects.
Enforce step, token, wall-clock and monetary budgets in the orchestrator rather than in the prompt, detect repetition and lack of progress as separate conditions, and require an approval bound to specific arguments before any irreversible action. Exhausting a budget should hand back partial work, not vanish.
Assess the candidate's capability to shift accessibility left through automated enforcement pipelines, inherently accessible design systems, and systemic remediation strategies at scale.
Return to whatever went worst this week. One session on a genuine weakness is worth three on material you already have.
Report two rates separately: ungroundedness, meaning claims the provided sources do not support, and factual error, meaning claims wrong about the world. Measure per claim, publish the abstention rate beside them, and name the query set that produced the numbers. Use this hallucination answer to show the decision, trade-off, and evidence rather than a memorised definition.
Lag is the integral of arrival rate minus service rate, so establish which of the two moved and whether the consumer is slow or stalled. Check lag per partition before per group, rule out a rebalance loop, and remember that adding consumers beyond the partition count does nothing.
An analysis of the challenges in designing a cost-effective, scalable GitHub Actions runner environment using spot instances, focusing on state management, instance termination handling, and performance tuning.
Vectors from two models live in unrelated spaces, so there is no incremental path — you re-embed and reindex the whole corpus. The real cost is running both indexes side by side long enough to compare them on a gold set, keeping query and document models in step, and retuning thresholds calibrated on the old scores.
Run the rounds back to back with a timer and no notes. The point is stamina and switching cost, which no amount of single-question practice reveals.
Compare it against a genuinely strong prompted baseline on a held-out set drawn from real traffic, using the task metric your product cares about, and run a broad regression set alongside to catch capability lost elsewhere. Falling training loss is evidence that training worked, not that the product improved.
Analyse approaches to mitigating packet loss in a fast-paced UDP environment, focusing on forward error correction and redundant data.
Treat any payload the fleet loads as a release, because it changes behaviour in production exactly as a binary does. It needs schema and replay validation, a canary ring with its own health comparison, and a rollback that survives the change breaking whatever would apply the rollback.
Ask the index directly whether the old text is still there, because that single check splits the problem into change detection, queue or write failure, a retire step that left duplicate chunks, or a downstream cache. Then fix the reason you learned about it from a user rather than an alert.
An accessible custom interactive component should start from the nearest native element, preserve keyboard and focus behavior, and use ARIA only for state that HTML cannot express.
A backup job that exits zero is a belief, not a control. Establishing recoverability means agreeing an RPO and RTO, then rehearsing a restore onto clean infrastructure, measuring how long it took and verifying the result — including everything the dump does not contain.
Write your stories in full, prepare the questions you will ask them, and stop early.
Declare it, take the incident commander role explicitly, and mitigate before you diagnose - roll back or shed load first, understand later. Keep one channel as the record, publish updates on a fixed cadence, hand over rather than push through, and let the review produce owned actions instead of narrative.
Find out what the date is being used for, then commit to something you can actually control — a timeboxed discovery end, a date for the date, or a narrow first slice — and never issue a single-point estimate for scope that is still undefined.
Name the clock and what it was costing, say which facts you had and which you chose not to wait for, classify the call as reversible or not, act at the level you were authorised to and say so, and record the reasoning at the time so it can be judged on what you knew.
Change what the meeting is about rather than how it is run: inspect the board against the Sprint Goal instead of polling individuals, stop being the person addressed, and push detail into a follow-on conversation. If the Sprint has no real goal, no format will save the event.
Scope is the union of the track's sections, the rounds this employer type asks regardless of role, and the industry if you named one. Weights above 1.0 pull a section up the order; below 1.0 push it down. Nothing is excluded - a deprioritised section still appears when its best question is the most relevant thing left.