Behavioral: End-to-End Service Ownership (Onsite)

You are interviewing for a Software Engineer role. Describe one production service you owned end-to-end. Cover the following:

1. Business goal and problem context
   • What business KPI or user problem motivated the service?
   • Baseline metrics and target (e.g., latency SLOs, conversion/engagement goals).
2. Your role and scope
   • Team size, your responsibilities, decision ownership, cross-functional partners.
3. Architecture overview
   • High-level data flow and dependencies (clients, API, compute, storage, streaming, caches).
   • SLOs/SLIs (latency, availability), scaling approach, observability.
4. Key technical decisions and rationale
   • Alternatives considered, criteria, and why you chose your approach.
5. Hardest trade-off
   • Options, technical/business criteria, risks, and the decision you made.
6. Significant incident you handled
   • What happened, timeline, your actions, outcome, and postmortem improvements.
7. How you measured impact
   • Technical and business metrics, experiment design (A/B, guardrails), and results.
8. What you would do differently
   • Process, architecture, or org improvements you’d apply with hindsight.

Notes:

• Keep proprietary details anonymized.
• Aim for a 5–7 minute, structured walkthrough.