Sample Answer
At a fintech startup, our payments service saw a sudden 8x spike in 5xx errors, blocking ~30% of card transactions over 20 minutes. As on-call backend engineer, I needed to restore service and protect data integrity. I first checked Grafana dashboards and Kubernetes pod logs, then used Kibana to correlate 5xxs with a recent deployment. Tracing via Jaeger showed timeouts on a downstream fraud-check gRPC call. I rolled back, put the service in partial-degraded mode with a circuit breaker (Resilience4j), and reprocessed failed messages from a Kafka DLQ. Post-mortem, I added request-level timeouts, bulkheads, and a read-only cache for fraud rules, plus SLO-based alerts on error rate and p95 latency. Result: reduced similar 5xx incidents by 90% over 6 months and cut mean time to recovery from 25 to 8 minutes.
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?