Sample Answer
(S) Our reporting API was timing out for enterprise customers requesting large data sets, with p95 latency exceeding 8 seconds and frequent 504s. (T) I was responsible for improving its performance so it could handle a 3x projected traffic increase for an upcoming launch. (A) I profiled the endpoint and found heavy synchronous aggregation and repeated joins on a large table. First, I introduced pagination and a maximum page size to avoid unbounded responses. Then I moved expensive aggregations to a nightly batch job that precomputed results into a summary table, reducing per-request work. I added proper composite indexes based on our most common filters and used a read replica for analytics traffic. Finally, I added caching for the most frequent queries with a 5–10 minute TTL in Redis. (R) The changes reduced p95 latency from ~8 seconds to under 900 ms and eliminated timeouts. The API comfortably handled 4x the previous peak load in load tests, and support tickets related to reporting slowness dropped by roughly 70% 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?