Show that you measure and improve on-call health: pages per shift, time to resolution, and engineer satisfaction should all be tracked and reviewed.
Strong answers include: reasonable rotation schedules, compensating on-call fairly, investing in reducing alert noise, runbooks for common issues, blameless culture, protected recovery time after incidents, and tracking on-call load as a team health metric. Best candidates mention that on-call should be a learning opportunity, not just a burden.
Reveals values and leadership. Candidates who normalise 24/7 hero culture are concerning. Look for sustainable practices that respect people's time and well-being.