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:
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Project Overview
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Business/customer problem and why it mattered
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Scope, timeline, team size, your level of ownership
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Tech stack and key systems involved
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Your Role and Responsibilities
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What you owned end-to-end
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Decisions you led, proposals/designs you authored
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Cross-team collaboration and leadership moments
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Key Technical Decisions
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Architecture and component choices; alternatives considered and trade-offs
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Data model, APIs, scaling, reliability, performance, security
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Build vs. buy; tooling and observability
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Key Product Decisions
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How requirements were prioritized (MVP vs. nice-to-have)
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Success criteria and constraints (deadlines, SLAs, compliance)
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Challenges and How You Solved Them
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Technical challenges (e.g., latency, consistency, incidents)
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Organizational challenges (e.g., alignment, scope creep)
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Debugging strategies and risk mitigation
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Execution Details
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Milestones, design reviews, testing strategy, rollout plan
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Collaboration (with PMs, SRE, QA, data, design)
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Metrics and Measurement
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Baseline metrics and targets (e.g., p95 latency, error rate, availability)
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How you instrumented, tested, and validated impact
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Results and Impact
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Quantified outcomes (before/after, percentage and absolute deltas)
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Business impact (conversion, cost, reliability, developer velocity)
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Retrospective
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What you would do differently and why
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Lessons learned and how you applied them later
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Artifacts (Optional)
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Design docs, dashboards, PRs, diagrams (sanitize sensitive details)