Top 3 On call Interview Questions
Browse 3 real-world technical and behavioral interview questions about On call. Review scenarios, edge cases, and architectural best practices.
Two departments share ownership of a critical service and blame each other after every incident. How do you fix it?
Shared service ownership means nobody is accountable, so the blame is a symptom of structure. Give one team ownership with matching authority, make the other department a customer with an interface and an SLO, write incident management and escalation down, and have both department heads visibly back the change.
You are on call, a deploy went out twenty minutes ago and production is degraded. Talk me through what you do.
Stabilise first and diagnose second, which usually means reverting the change before you understand it. Take one artefact of evidence on the way out, time-box the decision aloud, communicate impact on a fixed cadence, and treat the incident as open until the damage the deploy caused is repaired.
You get paged, the service is down, and nobody else is online yet. How do you run the incident?
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.