Interview › Resume & Behavioral
What is your approach to incident severity classification?
Resume & Behavioral · Advanced level
Answer
I handle incidents by creating structure quickly: define severity, assign incident command, identify customer impact, contain the blast radius, communicate on a cadence, and drive mitigation. I separate restoration from root cause analysis; during active impact, the first goal is to reduce customer harm through rollback, failover, feature disablement, scaling, or traffic control. After recovery, I drive a blameless review that produces concrete actions with owners and dates. The incident is not truly closed until the system is safer than before.
Technical explanation
Strong incident answers show leadership, not heroics: roles, facts, mitigation, communication, and follow-through.
Use user impact and data/security risk to set severity, not technical difficulty.
MTTR improvement comes from better detection, ownership, dashboards, runbooks, rollback, and decision-making.
Hands-on example
1. Declare severity and create roles: incident commander, scribe, communications owner, and technical owners.
2. Build a timeline from alerts, deploys, logs, traces, dependency status, and chat decisions.
3. Choose the safest mitigation: rollback, failover, feature flag disablement, scaling, or traffic shaping based on reversibility and blast radius.
4. Afterward, write the PIR with impact, contributing factors, what went well/poorly, and 3-5 owned action items.
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