Sample Answer
At my last company, our checkout API suddenly spiked from a P95 of ~400ms to over 3s, and error rate hit about 6%, impacting a few thousand users in a morning. We caught it through a Datadog alert tied to latency, not customer tickets, which helped. I jumped into the logs and APM traces and saw all slow paths hitting a new promotion endpoint we’d just shipped behind a feature flag. The code was doing an extra unindexed join on a large orders table. Short term, we hot-fixed by bypassing that code path for low-value promos and rolled the feature flag back to 0%. That brought P95 back under 500ms within minutes. Then I worked with our DBA to add the right composite index, wrote a regression test around the query plan, and added a load-test step in CI. After that, similar issues dropped off, and we didn’t see another promo-related incident for the next 9 months.
Keywords
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?