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IntermediateBEHAVIORAL
Describe a situation where product or business stakeholders pushed for a feature or deadline that conflicted with technical constraints or best practices on the backend. How did you handle the conversation, what trade-offs did you propose, and what was the outcome?
Backend Developer
General

Sample Answer

On a previous team, product wanted a “multi-region” launch for a big marketing event in six weeks. The ask was full active-active across three regions for our core API, which handled ~20M requests/day. Our existing architecture was single-region with some hard assumptions around shared state and cron jobs. Instead of just saying no, I walked them through a simple risk matrix: likelihood and impact of data inconsistency, failover issues, and the blast radius if something went wrong during the campaign. Then I proposed a phased approach: in six weeks, we’d support read-only traffic from secondary regions via replicated databases and a CDN layer, and keep all writes in the primary region with a clear RTO/RPO. They got their marketing story (“global launch”), we hit the deadline, and over the next quarter we finished true active-active with zero major incidents.

Keywords

Translated technical constraints into business risk languageProposed a phased, low-risk architecture instead of all-or-nothingUsed concrete metrics (traffic volume, RTO/RPO, incident risk) to alignDelivered a compromise that met the deadline and long-term goals
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