Behavioral and Leadership Prompt — Software Engineer (Technical Screen)
Provide structured, concise responses. Use the outline below so a first-time reader understands your context and impact without prior knowledge.
1) Career Narrative
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Summarize your career arc (roles, domains, and scope).
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Highlight 2–3 top achievements directly relevant to this role.
2) Deep-Dive: Most Challenging Project
a) Problem & Scope
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What problem were you solving? Why did it matter?
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Your role, ownership, and cross-functional scope.
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Constraints (SLOs, scale, latency, resources, time, compliance, etc.).
b) Options & Trade-offs
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Alternatives you considered.
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Key trade-offs (correctness vs. latency, CAP, cost, complexity, team skill, roadmap risk).
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Why you chose the final approach.
c) Implementation Details
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Architecture: components, responsibilities, data flows, storage model.
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Technologies and why (language/runtime, data stores, queues, protocols).
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Key algorithms and patterns (e.g., sharding, consensus, MVCC, backpressure, retries, idempotency).
d) Validation, Risk, and Metrics
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How you validated design choices (experiments, load tests, canaries, chaos, proofs).
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Risks and mitigations (rollout plan, feature flags, kill switches, rate limits).
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Metrics/SLOs you set; dashboards/alerts.
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Outcomes and measured impact.
e) Retrospective
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What you would do differently and why.
3) Meaningful Failure
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What happened and your contribution.
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Root cause and impact.
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What you learned and how you have applied it since.