Production Operations and Project Deep Dive

Problem Senior-level manager deep dive on how you build and RUN software in production. Anchor on your current project; for this role expect Java backend + AWS framing.

Be ready to discuss

• The project story: biggest technical challenges, why they were hard, your specific role in solving them; the tech stack end to end and the reasoning behind key choices.
• Deployment: how your containers are configured (Dockerfile layers, JVM flags in containers — heap vs container memory limits), CI/CD pipeline stages, environment configs/secrets management, rollout strategy (rolling/blue-green/canary) and rollback story.
• Monitoring: which dashboards you actually look at (latency percentiles, error rates, throughput, saturation — the golden signals), tools (CloudWatch/Grafana/Datadog/Splunk), distributed tracing, structured logging.
• Alerting: what you page on vs ticket on (symptom-based SLO alerts over cause-based noise), thresholds, escalation/on-call rotation, an incident you handled and its postmortem outcome.

What's evaluated

• Depth of production ownership — whether you operate what you build or hand it off; concrete numbers and real war stories over generic tooling lists; judgment about signal vs noise in observability.