Career

Describe the last Sev-1 incident you handled.

This question isn't really about the outage, it's about how you behave during one. A good answer shows metric-driven diagnosis, mitigation running in parallel with investigation, real numbers, and a lesson that changed a system rather than blamed a person. Vague heroics score badly; a specific timeline scores well.

Your branch is 5 commits behind main and you have uncommitted changes. How do you update safely?

Save the uncommitted work first with a stash or a WIP commit, then fetch and rebase onto origin/main, then bring it back. The real point is knowing what git pull would do to your branch before you run it.

You made a commit but forgot to include one file, and it isn't pushed yet. What do you do?

Stage the file and run `git commit --amend`. Amend doesn't edit the previous commit, it replaces it with a new one that has a new SHA, which is free while the commit is still local and a problem the moment someone else has it.

Your repository has hundreds of branches, many already merged into main. What would you change?

Deleting merged branches is easy and worth automating, but it's the symptom. The real disease is branches living long enough to diverge, which shows up as painful merges and untested integration risk. Fix PR size and review speed first, and watch for squash-merged branches that `--merged` can't even see.

An audit discovers that several Amazon S3 buckets across a company's AWS accounts have been made publicly readable by developers. The company must guarantee that no bucket in any account can be made public, and must be alerted to any bucket policy that grants access outside the organization. Which combination of actions meets these requirements?

S3 Block Public Access enforced at the account level is the preventive control, and IAM Access Analyzer is the detective one. The pairing matters: the exam separates stopping something from noticing it, and this stem asks for both.