Behavioral Prompt: Impactful Project (Software Engineer Technical Screen)

Provide a crisp 60–90 second overview of one impactful project you led or drove significantly, then deep dive. Focus on engineering decisions, measurable outcomes, and communication.

What to Cover

1. Problem: Why it mattered (user/business impact, constraints).
2. Your Role: Scope of ownership and collaboration.
3. Key Decisions & Trade-offs: Alternatives considered and why you chose one.
4. Measurable Impact: Concrete metrics (latency, reliability, cost, adoption, etc.).
5. Hardest Challenge: How you diagnosed and resolved it.
6. Communication: How you explained complex ideas to stakeholders and how you'd improve it.
7. Lessons & Next Time: What you learned and what you'd do differently.

Constraints

• Keep the initial overview to 60–90 seconds before the deep dive.
• Quantify results (e.g., p95 latency, error rate, throughput, cost) where possible.
• Assume a typical software engineering environment (services, data pipelines, SLOs).