Behavioral: Deep Dive Into Past Projects (Software Engineer, Technical Screen)

Provide 1–2 major software engineering projects from your recent experience. For each project, cover the following:

1. Project Overview

• Business/customer problem and why it mattered
• Scope, timeline, team size, your level of ownership
• Tech stack and key systems involved

2. Your Role and Responsibilities

• What you owned end-to-end
• Decisions you led, proposals/designs you authored
• Cross-team collaboration and leadership moments

3. Key Technical Decisions

• Architecture and component choices; alternatives considered and trade-offs
• Data model, APIs, scaling, reliability, performance, security
• Build vs. buy; tooling and observability

4. Key Product Decisions

• How requirements were prioritized (MVP vs. nice-to-have)
• Success criteria and constraints (deadlines, SLAs, compliance)

5. Challenges and How You Solved Them

• Technical challenges (e.g., latency, consistency, incidents)
• Organizational challenges (e.g., alignment, scope creep)
• Debugging strategies and risk mitigation

6. Execution Details

• Milestones, design reviews, testing strategy, rollout plan
• Collaboration (with PMs, SRE, QA, data, design)

7. Metrics and Measurement

• Baseline metrics and targets (e.g., p95 latency, error rate, availability)
• How you instrumented, tested, and validated impact

8. Results and Impact

• Quantified outcomes (before/after, percentage and absolute deltas)
• Business impact (conversion, cost, reliability, developer velocity)

9. Retrospective

• What you would do differently and why
• Lessons learned and how you applied them later

10. Artifacts (Optional)

• Design docs, dashboards, PRs, diagrams (sanitize sensitive details)