Sample Answer
At AcmePay I led a 6-week refactor of our transaction service that was causing 2% payment failures and 300ms tail latency spikes. The main trade-off was between a full rewrite (6+ months) and an incremental redesign. I proposed breaking the service into two bounded contexts, extracting the rate-limited gateway first to reduce blast radius. I ran a design review with product, SRE, and two senior engineers, built a canary plan, and estimated a 30% latency reduction with a 3-week rollout for phase one. After canarying on 5% of traffic and automating health checks, we rolled to 100% and saw failures drop from 2% to 0.2% and p99 latency drop 45% within a month. Regular demos and clear rollback criteria won stakeholder trust.
Keywords
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