IntermediatePROBLEM_SOLVING
In one of your recent cloud projects, you likely had both cost constraints and reliability or performance requirements. Pick a specific system you’ve worked on and explain how you balanced cost optimization (e.g., instance types, autoscaling, storage tiers, reservations/commitments) with resilience and SLAs. What tradeoffs did you explicitly accept?
Cloud Architect
General

Sample Answer

On a recent B2B analytics platform I led on AWS, we had a pretty tight budget target: keep infra under $120k/year while meeting a 99.9% uptime SLA and sub‑2s dashboard loads for ~3,000 concurrent users. I split the design into three cost profiles. For the customer‑facing API and dashboards, we used m6i on-demand instances in two AZs behind ALBs, with autoscaling based on RPS and latency. That layer stayed fully on-demand for fast recovery and predictable performance. For the batch and ETL layer, we moved 70% of the workload to Spot with diversified instance types and safe interruption handling; that alone cut compute cost by ~45%. On storage, hot data lived on GP3 with provisioned IOPS; historical data went to S3 Intelligent-Tiering and Glacier. The main tradeoff I accepted was slower ad‑hoc queries on older data (P95 ~7–8s instead of 3s), which we documented in the product expectations and customer SLAs.

Keywords

Explicit budget and SLA targets defined up frontDifferent cost profiles for user-facing vs batch workloadsHeavy use of Spot and storage tiering with clear guardrailsClear, documented tradeoff on latency for historical analytics
Related Questions

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?

IntermediatePROBLEM_SOLVING

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?

IntermediateBEHAVIORAL

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.

IntermediateTECHNICAL

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.

IntermediateTECHNICAL

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?

IntermediateSITUATIONAL