Tell me about a time you had to convince stakeholders to change priorities or accept technical debt repayment (for example, refactoring a pipeline, adding tests, or moving to Docker containers). How did you present the case and what was the outcome?

At my last company I led a push to containerize and add unit/integration tests for our Airflow+Spark pipelines. Support teams were swamped with 8 production incidents per month and deployments took ~2 hours; execs prioritized features over refactors. I measured incident cost (on-call hours, lost analyst productivity) and showed a 3-month ROI: invest 4 engineering weeks to migrate to Docker + CI, save ~150 hours/month and cut incident rate by 75%. I ran a 2-week pilot on a non-critical DAG, demoed faster reproducible runs, and published before/after metrics in Git. The stakeholders approved a phased rollout. Outcome: deployment time dropped to ~20 minutes, incidents fell from 8/month to 2/month, and the team reclaimed ~120 hours/month for new features.