Sample Answer
(S) On a Friday evening, our payment service error rate spiked from <0.2% to ~8%, impacting checkout for EU customers. (T) As the on-call backend developer, I needed to quickly restore service, identify root cause, and keep stakeholders informed. (A) I first confirmed the issue via dashboards (Grafana) and logs, then triggered our incident process and set severity to SEV-1. I rolled back the last deployment, which reduced errors to ~3% but didn’t fully resolve them. Tracing revealed timeouts to a third-party fraud API only for EU endpoints. I implemented a temporary circuit breaker with exponential backoff and a fallback to a less strict internal ruleset, then increased HTTP client timeouts slightly. In parallel, I posted updates every 15 minutes in our incident channel and provided a summary for support to share with customers. (R) Error rates dropped below 0.5% within 20 minutes, with full resolution in 2 hours after the provider fixed their issue. We documented the incident, added synthetic monitoring for third-party APIs, and reduced similar outages by ~60% over the next quarter.
Walk me through a recent multi-channel digital marketing campaign you managed end-to-end. How did you set objectives, choose channels, allocate budget, and measure success?
In your resume you note improving or optimizing [a process, KPI, or metric]. What specific baseline metrics did you start from, what steps did you personally take, and how did you verify that the improvement was due to your changes rather than external factors?
Based on your hydrology and irrigation engineering background, explain how you would estimate the irrigation water requirement for a kharif crop in a semi-arid region of Gujarat. Walk me through each step: from reference evapotranspiration estimation, crop coefficient selection, effective rainfall calculation, to arriving at canal discharge for a given command area.
In your civil engineering studies, what specific design coursework or project work did you complete related to irrigation channels or canals (e.g., design of lined/unlined canals, distributaries, minors)? Describe one such design in detail, including how you determined discharge, permissible velocity, section dimensions, and lining choice for Gujarat-type soil and climate conditions.
On your resume you mention working on a cross-functional project (e.g., involving multiple teams or stakeholders). Describe a situation from that project where priorities conflicted—how did you navigate the trade-offs and what was the final outcome?