Scenario format
Signal rounds
A senior interviewer rarely asks you to define things. They put a broken system in front of you, or a decision with two defensible answers, and then apply pressure. These 10 sets are written in that shape: the setup, what is really being tested, the weak answer next to the strong one, and a follow-up chain that keeps going until it finds your edge.
- The AI-assisted coding interview6 scenarios
Google, Meta and others now hand you an AI assistant during the coding round. The rubric changed — here is what is scored and how candidates fail it.
AI Engineering · senior
- The incident round6 scenarios
Six production symptoms with no stack trace. The interviewer describes what users see and watches how you narrow it down.
Backend · senior
- Distributed correctness6 scenarios
Exactly-once, ordering, clock skew, split brain, and saga rollback — the questions where the confident answer is usually wrong.
Backend · staff
- Senior & staff behavioral signal8 scenarios
The behavioral questions that actually decide senior and staff loops — scope, influence without authority, disagreement, and the answers that quietly fail.
Behavioral & Career · staff
- Kubernetes forensics6 scenarios
Six pods that will not run. CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, Pending, ImagePullBackOff, a stuck rollout, and a service returning nothing.
DevOps & Cloud · senior
- What does this print?10 scenarios
Ten snippets where the obvious answer is wrong. Predict the output, then explain the mechanism — the explanation is the actual question.
JavaScript · senior
- The code review round7 scenarios
Seven snippets that pass tests and review. Find the bug, name the failure mode, say what you would write instead.
Python · senior
- Frontend forensics6 scenarios
Six frontend symptoms — a render storm, a hydration mismatch only in production, an LCP that is fine in the lab and terrible in the field.
React · senior
- Query forensics6 scenarios
Six database symptoms — a plan that flipped, an index that made things slower, a lock nobody can find, a migration that took the site down.
SQL · senior
- The staff pressure round6 scenarios
Six decisions with no clean answer. The interviewer will disagree with whatever you pick — the question is whether your reasoning survives it.
System Design · staff