The Nine-Month Exit
Your datacenter contract ends in nine months and thirty services must move to the cloud, while four product teams keep shipping daily. You own the migration plan.
the situation
You lead infrastructure at a 200-person company whose datacenter contract expires in nine months, with no renewal option: the building is being decommissioned. Around thirty services run there, from a central monolith and its large relational database to a fringe of smaller services, some with owners and some without. Four product teams ship to production daily and leadership has publicly promised customers that feature delivery will not slow down. You have been handed ownership of the migration plan. The budget is real but not unlimited, and nobody currently at the company has done a migration this size.
what this interview covers
- Discovery before planning
- Sequencing and strategy calls
- The mid-migration incident, live
- Organizational and cost pressure
- Trade-off interrogation
- Closing out and ownership
How the interview works
One scenario, 45 minutes, hard stop. The interviewer works through the situation with you - design, incident, trade-offs - and will not confirm or correct anything until the debrief. There are more questions in the arc than most people reach; how far you get matters less than how well you reason. Saying you do not know and moving on beats bluffing. When time runs out, you are graded on everything you covered.
about this interview
About
You lead infrastructure at a 200-person company, and the datacenter your thirty services live in closes in nine months, no extensions. The whole interview happens inside that situation: discovery, sequencing, the database at the center of it, a mid-migration incident, teams that fall behind, a cloud bill that lands wrong, and the question of when a migration is actually done. Your answers earlier in the conversation become facts the interviewer can hold you to later.
The interviewer works through it with you the way a real senior screen does. It probes, asks for the reasoning behind your calls, and moves on. What it never does is react: no "good", no "not quite", no hint of how you are doing. That silence is not a signal, it is the format. If you do not know something, saying so and moving on reads far better than bluffing, because everything is scored later against a rubric written in advance.
The clock is a hard 45 minutes. When it runs out, the interview stops wherever you are, exactly like a real screen, and you are graded on everything you covered - stopping mid-scenario is normal, not a failure. The debrief at the end is where all the withheld feedback arrives: per-question scoring against the rubric, what a senior answer also includes, any flags an interviewer would note, the model answer in full, and a hire-signal verdict for the session.