Interview prompt
Problem context
A customer platform runs active-passive across two regions. Leadership promises a 15-minute RTO and one-minute RPO, but failover has never been tested at full scale, the passive region runs at 30% capacity, and several third-party allowlists point only to primary egress addresses.
Skills being evaluated
disaster-recovery planningfencingcapacity readinessrunbook design
The full reasoning guide is part of Pro
The scenario and evaluation focus above remain public. Pro unlocks the structured answer, trade-off analysis, follow-up probes, common weak answers, rubric, related reasoning, and any architecture diagram.
Sign in to continueWhat the full guide covers
Clarify the decision
Establish scale assumptions
Functional and non-functional requirements
High-level architecture
Data model and flow
Consistency and transaction boundaries
Failure modes and recovery
Security and privacy
Observability and SLOs
Capacity and cost
Alternatives and trade-offs
Evolution and migration
What Staff and Principal candidates should emphasize