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