External job interviews

• Service failures have exceeded the target range, but the business has firm feature commitments. How would you adjust the release pace and investment in reliability?Quality, security, and safety
• Backups report success, but the team has never verified restored data integrity or recovery time. How would you establish demonstrable recovery capability?Quality, security, and safety
• A new external service will access user data and trigger internal actions. How would you perform a lightweight but effective threat model?Quality, security, and safety
• The system uses pre-signed URLs for private downloads, but links can be forwarded or retained for a long time. How would you design authorization and expiry boundaries?System design
• How should the permission system of a large operations back office be designed? How do you organize roles, data scope, approvals, and audit, and how do you keep it from getting out of control as permissions multiply?System design
• How would you design an article editing and publishing system? How should state and data be organized for drafts, review, scheduled publishing, multi-channel distribution, and edits after publication?System design
• Issuing a coupon after payment used to run synchronously, and it is being changed to an async queue with retries. Review this change: which failure sequences worry you most, and what would you rehearse before release?System design
• From a file or the network to picture and sound playing, what stages does a video go through? How do decoding, audio-video sync, stutter, and hardware acceleration each affect the experience?Computer-science foundations
• How would you design an online audio or video editor? How should the timeline, assets, non-destructive editing, preview, and final export each be designed?System design
• How would you design a platform where operations staff build campaigns and game mechanics themselves? How do you abstract campaigns, mechanics, rules, and features into configurable parts, and how do you keep a configuration correct once it goes live?System design
• Before drawing any architecture diagram, which few numbers would you use to decide whether a service should be split or cached? Use a service you know to explain.System design
• How would you design a document system for real-time multi-user editing? When several people edit the same passage at once, how do you guarantee eventual consistency, and how do you merge after offline edits?System design
• From an engineering view, how do you estimate the overall cost of a system? How are storage and compute costs each calculated, and which grow linearly with scale and which do not?System design
• When the business operates across several countries and regions and user data must flow across borders, how do you solve data compliance in systems and processes, and how do you judge and decide in gray areas where the rules are unclear?System design
• The local database has updated, but syncing the cache or sending a downstream message fails. How would you make the systems converge and handle retries, compensation, or manual recovery?System design
• A major promotion or international launch may increase traffic fivefold next year. Starting from the current architecture, how would you check for bottlenecks in the gateway, critical request flows, storage, and machine resources? How would you phase the work, staff it, and validate your assumptions?System design
• How would you design a product where a person and an AI write together? How are the AI's edits shown, accepted, or rejected, and how are conflicts handled when both edit at once?System design
• How would you design an immersive audio and video feed so that swiping up and down has almost no waiting? How do you balance preloading, player reuse, memory, and data?System design
• Design a collaboration product that supports large-file uploads with resumability, where files must be validated and scanned before other members can access them. What constraints would you clarify, and how would you design upload, temporary storage, scanning, publication, permissions, and cleanup boundaries?System design
• How would you design a large-model chat system? How do you handle streamed output, multi-turn context, history, interruption, and retries, and how do you control cost and latency?System design
• How do the costs of a recommender system add up, including retrieval, ranking, feature serving, storage, and experimentation? How would you trade effect against cost?System design
• How would you design an invitation-based viral marketing campaign? How do you design invitation relationships, reward payout, abuse prevention, and effect evaluation?System design
• To build an online editor like Doc, PPT, or PS, how do you design the core data model and rendering? How do you handle undo and redo, selection, and performance on large files?System design
• How would you design a real-time risk control system? How do rules, features, models, and manual review work together, and how do you trade false blocks against misses?System design
• How would you design a search system? How do indexing, retrieval, and ranking divide the work, how are Chinese segmentation and features built, and how do you judge how good the search is?System design
• How should the loading and request strategy of streaming media be designed so it starts fast and does not stall? How do you trade off segmenting, adaptive bitrate, preloading, and caching?System design
• Tell me about a project you worked on. Why did you choose that technical approach over the others, how was the decision made, and what were its pros and cons?System design
• How should coupons, discounts, and flash sales integrate with a trading system without slowing the core transaction flow? How would you calculate, combine, and reconcile discounts?System design
• Public benchmarks keep improving while internal task performance stalls. How would you investigate evaluation distortion?AI evaluation and governance
• The product wants confident AI conclusions, but evidence supports only probabilistic judgments. How would you design communication and traceability?AI evaluation and governance
• After AI output causes actual user harm, product, model, operations, and review teams all take part in the response. How would you divide incident handling and follow-up improvement?AI evaluation and governance
• After replacing a foundation model, overall metrics remain similar but some users report worse results. How would you identify what changed in model behavior and decide whether to roll back?AI evaluation and governance
• You need to sample production AI conversations for emerging risks, but they contain personal or commercial data. How would you design the review?AI evaluation and governance
• A third-party model provider changes its training, retention, or cross-border terms. When should calls pause or receive renewed approval?AI evaluation and governance
• Average AI quality meets the target, but a few high-risk errors can cause harm. How would you set the release gate?AI evaluation and governance
• An AI assistant can call internal tools, but tasks require different permissions. How would you design authorization and audit?AI evaluation and governance
• When the model cannot establish an answer, should the product refuse, return a low-confidence result, or escalate to a person? What distinguishes the choices?AI evaluation and governance
• Overall AI accuracy passes, but one language or user segment has a higher error rate. How would you assess and respond?AI evaluation and governance

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• Renewal fell by six percentage points this quarter, while the share of small customers among new accounts rose. How would you segment customers, usage periods, and service cost to determine whether product value fell or the customer mix changed?Business context
• Besides your product, what else could users do to get the same job done? What does each alternative compete for, and when is it actually the better choice?Business context
• Sales reports growth using signed contract value, but customers will not use the product for months. How would you distinguish contracting, fulfillment, revenue recognition, and customer value, and explain what the team should observe?Business context
• A premium service tier earns more revenue but consumes more human support, and renewal has not improved. How would you determine whether it creates incremental value?Business context
• A product is sold once but requires long-term support and upgrades. Revenue is growing while the service queue accumulates. How would you decide whether these sales still create value?Business context
• Pick a module you own. Explain who it serves, what input it takes, what output it provides, and follow the user task through to the business result.Business context
• When you explain a business, how do you first lay out the whole and then the position and value of the part you own within it? How does someone without a whole-picture view tell it, and what is the difference?Business context
• A customer buys a bundle and then asks to refund one item. How should the original bundle discount be reallocated?Commercial rules

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• Visits and registrations are growing, but match success is falling. Demand concentrates in a few regions while suppliers are scattered. How would you find the liquidity bottleneck and choose where to invest first?Market and economic judgment
• A marketplace raises commission by two points. Revenue rises short term, but some high-quality suppliers list less often; buyer conversion has not moved yet. How would you assess long-term impact?Market and economic judgment
• After a subscription price increase, monthly revenue rises 8%, but cancellations grow among small core customers. Sales wants to continue. How would you estimate net benefit and long-term risk?Market and economic judgment
• Gross margin is steady, but standard-service revenue falls while custom-service revenue grows, along with implementation and support hours. How would you determine whether growth is healthy?Market and economic judgment

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