Senior Engineering Manager - Compute

Netflix

How would you implement a stack using another data structure?

Netflix

High-Level Design for Zero-Downtime Live Production Systems Imagine you're tasked with designing a live production system that requires zero downtime during deployments and updates. This system handles a large volume of requests and is critical to the business. Let's consider a scenario: Scenario: You are building a service that provides real-time stock quotes to users. The service needs to be highly available and scalable to handle peak loads. Deployments must not interrupt the service, ensuring users always receive the latest data. Questions to address in your design: High-Level Architecture: Describe the overall architecture of the system. Include key components, their responsibilities, and how they interact. Deployment Strategy: Detail the deployment strategy you would use to achieve zero downtime. Explain the steps involved in deploying new versions of the service. Load Balancing: How would you distribute traffic across different instances of the service to ensure high availability and prevent overload? Monitoring and Rollback: What monitoring tools and metrics would you use to detect issues during deployment? Describe the rollback strategy in case of a failed deployment. Data Consistency: How would you ensure data consistency across different instances of the service during updates? Scaling: How would you scale the system horizontally to handle increased traffic? Explain each of these areas with consideration to both the design and the practical steps required for running such a system in live production. Consider specific technologies and tools where appropriate to illustrate your understanding. This question aims to assess your understanding of designing and operating highly available systems, your knowledge of deployment strategies, and your ability to handle real-world challenges in a production environment.

Netflix

Let's delve into your past projects and experiences. I am interested in understanding how you approach problem-solving in real-world scenarios. Could you walk me through a particularly challenging project you've worked on, outlining the initial problem, the steps you took to address it, and the final outcome? What obstacles did you encounter, and how did you overcome them? Furthermore, what specific technologies or methodologies did you employ, and why were they chosen? For example, perhaps you worked on a project to optimize a database query that was causing performance bottlenecks. What steps did you take to identify the root cause of the bottleneck? Did you use any specific profiling tools or techniques? How did you determine the best approach to optimize the query, and what were the trade-offs involved? What was the measurable impact of your optimization efforts on the overall system performance? Alternatively, consider a project where you were tasked with migrating a legacy application to a new platform. What were the key challenges involved in this migration? How did you ensure data integrity and minimal downtime during the transition? What strategies did you use to manage the complexities of the migration process, and how did you collaborate with other team members to achieve a successful outcome? Finally, reflect on a time when you had to learn a new technology or skill quickly to contribute to a project. What strategies did you employ to accelerate your learning process? How did you apply your newfound knowledge to solve real-world problems within the project, and what lessons did you learn from this experience?