Interview Question: Tell me about a time you handled a production outage or critical incident.
Production incidents are high-pressure situations that reveal your technical skills, composure under pressure, and communication abilities. Interviewers want to see you can be trusted when things go wrong.
What Interviewers Are Looking For
- Composure: Can you stay calm in a crisis?
- Systematic Debugging: Do you have a methodical approach?
- Communication: Do you keep stakeholders informed?
- Learning: Did you prevent recurrence?
STAR Framework
S - Situation
What was the incident? What was the impact?
A - Action
- Assess scope and impact immediately
- Communicate status to stakeholders
- Systematic debugging (logs, metrics, recent changes)
- Implement fix and verify
- Post-incident review
R - Result
Resolution, impact mitigation, and prevention measures.
✓ Strong Answer
"Our payment system went down during peak hours. I took incident command, delegated investigation to teammates, and posted updates to our status page every 15 minutes. We traced it to a database connection pool exhaustion from a recent deploy. We rolled back, restored service in 40 minutes. In the postmortem, I championed adding connection pool monitoring and automatic rollback triggers."