Behavioral/Leadership: Deep Dive on a Significant Project
Context: Onsite software engineering interview. Choose one substantial project you personally drove or co-owned within the past 1–2 years.
Prompt: Provide a concise but complete walkthrough covering:
-
Business problem and why it mattered (users, revenue, risk)
-
Your role, scope, and stakeholders
-
System architecture overview (services, data stores, infra)
-
Key components and data flows (read/write paths, events, APIs)
-
Major implementation details (design decisions, testing, observability)
-
Main challenges encountered and how you diagnosed them
-
Resolutions and tradeoffs considered
-
Metrics moved (primary and guardrail) and validation approach
-
Retrospective: what you’d do differently
Guidance:
-
Focus on what you owned, not just what the team did.
-
Use concrete numbers (latency, error rate, cost, conversion) and timelines.
-
A rough sketch (verbal) of the architecture is welcome.
-
Target 5–7 minutes for the walkthrough, then Q&A.