Behavioral Prompt: Proactive Action (Software Engineer — Technical Screen)

You are interviewing for a software engineering role. The interviewer wants to assess how you take initiative to solve technical problems or seize opportunities without being asked, and how you reason about options, risk, and impact.

Describe a time you proactively took action first to solve a problem or seize an opportunity. Include:

1. Context/Situation: What was happening, why it mattered, who was affected, and any constraints.
2. Options Considered: Which approaches you evaluated and the trade-offs (speed, risk, cost, reversibility).
3. Immediate Actions: The specific steps you took in the first 24–72 hours and why.
4. Impact: Measurable results (e.g., latency, error rate, throughput, cost, revenue, developer time), with numbers.
5. Pushback/Uncertainty: How you handled disagreement, risk, or unknowns (experiments, flags, canaries, rollback).
6. Learnings: What you would repeat or change next time.

Guidance: Use a concise STAR(L) structure (Situation, Task, Action, Result, Learning) and aim for a 2–3 minute story with concrete metrics.