IntermediateBEHAVIORAL
Describe a time you had to debug a production issue that involved both frontend and backend symptoms (for example, incorrect data displayed in the UI that traced back to server or database logic). How did you isolate the root cause across the stack, and what permanent fix or safeguards did you implement?
Full Stack Developer
General

Sample Answer

At my last role, support escalated a bug where some enterprise customers were seeing negative usage numbers on their billing dashboard. The frontend charts were clearly wrong, but only for about 5% of accounts. I started by reproducing it using production-like data in a staging environment and captured the exact API responses the React app was rendering. The network tab showed correct totals for daily usage but incorrect monthly aggregates. That pointed to the backend. I traced the request through our Node service and found a race condition: a nightly job was backfilling data while the aggregation query was running, and our SQL window function didn’t account for partial days. Under load, it occasionally double-counted adjustments. I fixed the query, added idempotency to the backfill job, and introduced contract tests to ensure the API never returns negative usage. We also added a simple UI guardrail to flag and hide impossible values. The issue went from multiple tickets per week to zero over the next quarter.

Keywords

Systematic debugging starting from the UI and drilling into API responsesUse of staging with production-like data to safely reproduce the bugIdentified a backend race condition and fixed both the query and job behaviorImplemented tests and UI guardrails to prevent regressions
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