How to Tackle Legacy System Migration Questions in Senior Tech Interviews

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Senior engineering interviews increasingly feature 'brownfield' prompts that ask candidates to migrate legacy systems rather than design new ones from scratch. These questions test risk sequencing, respect for existing systems, and comfort with constraints — skills that greenfield design prompts cannot assess. Interviewers focus less on the target architecture and more on how a candidate orders safe, reversible intermediate steps during a live migration. Experts suggest framing the answer around an ordered set of safe states rather than a final architecture diagram, with each step being observable and rollback-capable. This approach mirrors real-world staff-level engineering work, where renovating an occupied system is far more common than building fresh ones.

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