Own the database platform behind Robinhood's brokerage — no downtime during market hours

Robinhood's Storage Platform team runs the relational (Postgres/Aurora), key-value (DynamoDB), and caching systems that thousands of databases and hundreds of caching clusters depend on. This interview probes whether you can design connection pooling, query routing, and automation that hold up under strict brokerage uptime targets, and whether you've actually carried the on-call pager for systems like this.

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What this interview tests

PostgreSQL schema/indexing/replication depth
Connection pooling and query routing design
Production incident response and root-causing availability issues
Automation to reduce manual database/cache operations
Observability (metrics, logs, tracing) for storage systems
Go or Rust backend proficiency

Common question themes

Design a connection pooling layer for a service under bursty traffic

Walk through a real production incident on a database or cache you owned

How would you route reads/writes safely across a primary and replicas

Automating a manual, repetitive database operations task

Tradeoffs between DynamoDB and a relational store for a given access pattern

How candidates describe it

Real Senior Software Engineer interview stories — retold from candidates' public write-ups, with sources.

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