I started with scoping questions (single customer or widespread, when did it start, any recent deployments) which felt right, but then I got too deep into the diagnostic weeds and lost the stakeholder communication thread entirely.
Structure your answer around a clear triage framework: start by gathering essential information, then prioritize investigation based on impact and likelihood, and finally communicate proactively with stakeholders. Emphasize customer obsession and ownership, key Amazon leadership principles, by focusing on resolving the issue quickly while keeping the customer informed.
Pro tip: Demonstrate bias for action by describing how you'd set up a war room or bridge call early, and show you think about both immediate mitigation and long-term root cause prevention.
Collect key details from the customer: scope (single user vs. multiple), symptoms (latency, errors, complete outage), timeline, recent changes, and affected services. Clarify impact and urgency.
Assess severity based on customer impact and business criticality. Determine if it's isolated or widespread, and prioritize accordingly. Engage relevant teams (support, engineering, network) based on initial findings.
Check monitoring dashboards, logs (e.g., CloudWatch, VPC Flow Logs), and network configurations. Use tools like AWS Health Dashboard, Trusted Advisor, and traceroute to pinpoint the issue. Consider recent deployments or config changes.
Establish a communication cadence with stakeholders (customer, internal teams). Provide regular updates, even if no progress, and set expectations. Use a single source of truth (e.g., ticket, Slack channel) for transparency.
Implement fix or workaround, verify resolution with customer, and conduct a post-mortem to identify root cause and preventive actions. Share learnings with relevant teams.
AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.