Deep Dive: Past Project You Led or Owned

Provide a thorough walkthrough of a project where you had ownership or leadership responsibility. Cover the following:

1. Problem and Context
   • What problem were you solving and for whom?
   • Why was it important (business and user impact)?
   • Key constraints (time, budget, compliance, SLOs).
2. Architecture Overview
   • High-level system diagram (describe components and data flow).
   • Technologies, data stores, protocols, and deployment model.
3. Critical Design Decisions
   • The major choices you made and alternatives considered.
   • Reasoning and trade-offs (latency, cost, complexity, reliability, team skill).
4. Role and Contributions
   • Your responsibilities, ownership scope, and collaboration with other functions.
   • Specific components you designed/built and leadership actions you took.
5. Toughest Technical Challenges
   • The hardest issues you faced and how you diagnosed/resolved them.
   • Tools, experiments, and validation used.
6. Measurable Outcomes
   • Quantitative results (e.g., latency, availability, cost, revenue, engagement).
   • Before/after metrics and how you measured them.
7. Hindsight and Lessons
   • Trade-offs you would change if you could.
   • Principles and practices you would carry into future work.