Debug real production incidents. Under real time pressure.
SeniorEng puts engineers inside real incidents — live dashboards, real metrics, the clock running. Used by engineering teams for hiring signal, onboarding, and keeping skills sharp.
Payment Service: Error rate 94% · 6 min ago
Your Move
Hint available · Score tracked
The Problem
Interviews test algorithms. The job requires something else.
LeetCode, take-homes, system design — none of them test what actually matters on the job: debugging a production incident at 2am when three services are down and your manager is pinging you.
What interviews test
- ✕Pattern recognition
- ✕Weekend CRUD builds
- ✕Whiteboard system design
What the job actually requires
- ✓Debugging live systems under pressure
- ✓Following signals across logs, metrics, traces
- ✓Forming and updating hypotheses fast
What SeniorEng tests
- ✓Real incidents with real dashboards
- ✓Time pressure and manager escalation
- ✓Hypothesis → action → result loops
Use Cases
How engineering teams use SeniorEng
Hiring Signal
See how candidates think under pressure, not just what they know. Use an incident as a final round — the results are unambiguous.
Replaces or augments the take-home. 20-30 min. Scored automatically.
Onboarding
Get new engineers familiar with how real incidents look and feel — before they're on-call. Faster ramp, less anxiety.
New hires do 3-5 problems in week 1. Builds mental models fast.
Team Practice
Run a real incident as a team exercise. See who leads, who follows, who panics. Great for identifying skill gaps before they matter.
Works as a group exercise or async. Scores make it competitive.
The Problem Library
25 incidents. All based on real outages.
Not toy problems. Real failure modes from real companies — reconstructed with accurate metrics, realistic dashboards, and the same signals the on-call engineer had.
GitHub
MySQL replication failure
HardKnight Capital
$440M in 45 minutes
HardCrowdStrike
8.5M Windows BSODs
HardCloudflare
19 datacenters down
HardNetflix
Down on Christmas Eve
MediumYouTube, Gmail, Meet down
MediumAWS
S3 100% failure
HardMeta
Zero external traffic
HardEarly Feedback
"I used it as the final round for two candidates. The difference in how they approached the incident told me everything the take-home didn't."
Engineering Manager
Fintech company
"We had a production incident two weeks after I did the disk I/O problem here. Services were degrading, all the obvious metrics looked fine. I checked disk I/O first and found it quickly. Wouldn't have known to look there before."
Rohan M.
Senior Software Engineer, Payments Platform
"I used to dread code reviews — I'd leave comments but never felt confident catching real issues. After doing a few problems here I started actually understanding what to look for. My reviews are much more useful now."
Priya S.
Software Engineer, E-commerce
"The dashboards look exactly like what we use in prod. Other simulations feel like toy problems — this doesn't."
Senior SWE
Series B startup
Get Started
Working with 10 teams for free
In exchange for a weekly 15-minute feedback call. No pitch, no sales pressure — just show us how your team uses it.