Behavioral and Leadership Prompt — Software Engineer (Technical Screen)

Provide structured, concise responses. Use the outline below so a first-time reader understands your context and impact without prior knowledge.

1) Career Narrative

• Summarize your career arc (roles, domains, and scope).
• Highlight 2–3 top achievements directly relevant to this role.

2) Deep-Dive: Most Challenging Project

a) Problem & Scope

• What problem were you solving? Why did it matter?
• Your role, ownership, and cross-functional scope.
• Constraints (SLOs, scale, latency, resources, time, compliance, etc.).

b) Options & Trade-offs

• Alternatives you considered.
• Key trade-offs (correctness vs. latency, CAP, cost, complexity, team skill, roadmap risk).
• Why you chose the final approach.

c) Implementation Details

• Architecture: components, responsibilities, data flows, storage model.
• Technologies and why (language/runtime, data stores, queues, protocols).
• Key algorithms and patterns (e.g., sharding, consensus, MVCC, backpressure, retries, idempotency).

d) Validation, Risk, and Metrics

• How you validated design choices (experiments, load tests, canaries, chaos, proofs).
• Risks and mitigations (rollout plan, feature flags, kill switches, rate limits).
• Metrics/SLOs you set; dashboards/alerts.
• Outcomes and measured impact.

e) Retrospective

• What you would do differently and why.

3) Meaningful Failure

• What happened and your contribution.
• Root cause and impact.
• What you learned and how you have applied it since.