Behavioral & Leadership: End-to-End Project + Ambiguous Production Incident

You are interviewing for a Software Engineer (Onsite) role. Provide a concise but comprehensive narrative.

Part A — Complex Project You Led End-to-End

Explain one complex project you personally led from inception to launch.

Cover:

1. Problem context and business impact
2. Your specific responsibilities and scope
3. Stakeholders and how you engaged them
4. Requirements
   • Functional
   • Non-functional (e.g., latency SLOs, availability, compliance, security, cost)
5. Architecture overview (key components, data flow, technologies, interfaces)
6. Key trade-offs (performance vs. cost vs. delivery time) and your decisions
7. Major risks and mitigations (e.g., migration, data quality, privacy, operational)
8. Measurable outcomes (KPIs, SLOs, adoption, cost, timelines)
9. Follow-ups:
   • Alternative designs you evaluated and why you rejected them
   • What you would change in hindsight
   • How you handled tough feedback or changing priorities

Part B — Ambiguous Production Problem

Given an ambiguous production issue you have not seen before, outline how you would proceed:

1. How you break down and frame the problem
2. Initial hypotheses and telemetry you would gather
3. Success criteria and stopping conditions
4. Which teams you would engage (e.g., SRE, networking, security, data infrastructure, product)
5. How you would structure a minimal proof of concept (MVP test) to validate a root cause or mitigation
6. How you would communicate progress and escalate if blocked