IntermediateLEADERSHIP
Describe a time you led a technical initiative (architecture change, migration, or major feature) — how did you set strategy, coordinate execution across the team, handle pushback, and measure success?
Backend Developer
General

Sample Answer

At my last company I led a nine-month migration from a monolith to a service-oriented architecture across a 10-engineer backend team. I started by defining clear goals: cut deploy time from ~6 hours to under 30 minutes, improve availability from 98% to 99.9%, and enable independent team releases. I wrote an RFC, prioritized services by risk and traffic, and created a phased migration plan with automated tests and feature flags. I coordinated weekly syncs with frontend, QA, and SRE, paired engineers on initial extractions, and maintained a rollback playbook. When people pushed back on perceived risk, I ran canary rollouts and live demos to build trust. Within six months deploy time hit 25 minutes, incidents dropped 70%, and developer cycle time improved 40%.

Keywords

Set measurable goals (deploy time, availability, developer cycle time)Phased plan with RFC, tests, feature flags, and rollback strategyCross-team coordination and handling pushback via canaries and demos