Discord·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen·Senior

Senior

Jun 2026

Summary

Discord SWE interview with a question focused on operational experience. Pretty specific and not the kind of thing you can bluff your way through if you haven't actually been on-call before.

Questions Asked (1)

Do you have on-call experience? Walk through the rotations you've been part of, the kinds of incidents you've handled, the runbooks and tooling your team used, and a specific incident you either led or learned something meaningful from.

Root Cause AnalysisTechnical Trade-offsAdaptability & Ambiguity

Author's notes

This question has a lot of parts and it's easy to just list things without actually saying anything.

Create a free account to read the full note

AI HintsAI Generated

Suggested Approach

Structure your answer around a specific rotation and incident to show depth, not just breadth. Use the STAR method to walk through the incident, emphasizing your diagnostic process, the tools you used, and the lessons learned. Connect your experience to Discord's scale and real-time communication challenges.

Pro tip: Show that you think about prevention, not just firefighting—mention how you improved runbooks, added monitoring, or reduced alert noise after an incident. This demonstrates ownership and a proactive mindset that senior engineers value.

1. Set the context

Briefly describe the team, the service, and the on-call rotation structure (e.g., weekly, follow-the-sun). Mention the scale and criticality to show you understand the stakes.

2. Outline the tooling and runbooks

Name the monitoring, alerting, and incident management tools (e.g., Datadog, PagerDuty, Grafana) and explain how runbooks were used and maintained.

3. Walk through a specific incident

Choose one incident you led or learned from. Use STAR: describe the situation, your task, the actions you took (including debugging steps), and the resolution.

4. Highlight the root cause and fix

Explain how you identified the root cause, the immediate fix, and any long-term preventive measures (e.g., code change, monitoring improvement).

5. Share the lesson and impact

Conclude with what you learned, how it changed your approach, and any broader impact on the team (e.g., reduced incidents, faster MTTR).

Key Points to Mention

Rotation structure and team size (e.g., weekly rotations, escalation paths)
Monitoring and alerting tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, PagerDuty)
Incident management process (e.g., severity levels, communication channels)
Runbook usage and improvements (e.g., creating or updating runbooks)
A specific incident with clear root cause analysis and resolution
Lessons learned and preventive measures (e.g., automation, better testing)

AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.