Sample Answer
On one of our Spring Boot payment services running on Ubuntu, we suddenly saw p95 latency jump from 300ms to 5s and a spike in 5xx errors, affecting about 8% of traffic. I SSH’d into one of the pods’ nodes, started with `top` and `htop` and saw CPU fine but load and thread count high. I tailed logs with `tail -f` and checked `journalctl` for any OS-level issues. Then I grabbed a thread dump using `jstack` on the Java PID and saw dozens of threads blocked on a single DB call. Using `ss -tnp` and `tcpdump` I confirmed connections piling up to the database. Query logs showed an ORM-generated query missing an index after a recent release. I worked with the DBA to add an index and temporarily rolled back the feature via config. Errors dropped back below 0.2% and latency normalized within minutes.
Keywords
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?
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?
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?