Senior DevOps — Live Incident Assessment

Senior DevOps — technical screen

Before you begin

This is a live, timed exercise in two parts. Please keep your screen shared with your interviewer throughout.

Part 1 is a live incident — something is wrong in production and you'll investigate it using an ops console (click to pull telemetry, or ask your on-call partner questions by typing or speaking). Part 2 is a fast round of tooling and security questions. total, once you start.

Your name

The clock starts on the next screen, once you're ready.

Part 1 — Live incident

fd-booking-api is degrading in production

It's 2:14 AM IST. You're the on-call Senior DevOps engineer for PayBridge, a Banking-as-a-Service platform running on AWS — EKS microservices, RDS Postgres (Multi-AZ), ElastiCache Redis, SQS, behind an ALB. PagerDuty just paged you: the partner-facing FD-booking API is throwing elevated 5xx errors and latency has spiked. Partners are starting to notice. You've joined the incident channel, where Aman — another on-call SRE — is already looking into it with you.

Use the Ops Console to:

Pull telemetry with the quick-check buttons (metrics, logs, deploys, queues)
Ask Aman anything else, by typing or speaking
Form a hypothesis and confirm it before you commit to a fix

Then write up (type or speak):

Root cause — what happened, and why
Immediate mitigation — what stops the bleeding right now
Long-term fix — what prevents this class of issue recurring
A 2–3 sentence stakeholder update you'd post in the next 5 minutes

You'll have minutes for this part. Right after you submit, Part 2 is a focused -minute round of tooling/security questions.

Part 1 submitted

Nice — on to Part 2

A fast round of tooling and security questions. No console this time — just your own knowledge, typed or spoken.