Describe Past Project And Debugging Approach
Overview
This Behavioral & Leadership interview question evaluates technical leadership, end-to-end project ownership, incident diagnosis and production debugging skills within the software engineering domain, including observability, stakeholder coordination, and reliability considerations such as SLA/SLO and scalability constraints.
SoFi
Jul 16, 2025, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
Onsite
Behavioral & Leadership
0
0
Behavioral + Technical Leadership: End-to-End Project and Production Bug
Provide a recent, specific example of a project you led end-to-end. Use one concrete incident to show how you diagnose and fix a difficult production bug.
Cover the following:
- Project overview
- Goal, scope, and your role/ownership
- Key stakeholders and constraints (SLA/SLO, scale, compliance, deadlines)
- Production bug context
- Symptoms and business impact (who/what was affected, severity, timeline)
- How it was detected (alerts, dashboards, user reports)
- Debugging approach
- Initial hypotheses and how you prioritized them
- Instrumentation/probes you added (temporary metrics, logs, traces, feature flags)
- Specific logs/metrics/traces you used and what they showed
- Any reproduction steps in lower environments
- How you isolated the root cause
- Fix and verification
- Code/config/data changes
- Tests added (unit, integration, e2e, chaos/fault injection)
- Release strategy (feature flag, canary, rollback plan)
- Monitoring and success criteria used to verify the fix
- Trade-offs and alternatives
- What you chose and why; what you deliberately deferred
- What you'd do differently next time
- Process/architecture/observability improvements you would make
- Feedback and growth
- How you incorporated feedback from peers/stakeholders and how it helped you operate at the next level
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