Sample Answer
At my last company, our Node/TypeScript API started throwing intermittent 504s on a checkout endpoint, maybe 0.5% of requests, but it spiked to 3–4% during flash sales. Logs just showed timeouts to a downstream inventory service. It wasn’t reproducible in staging. I added high-cardinality tracing with OpenTelemetry and tagged requests with tenant, region, and feature flags. We also enabled p99 latency and connection-pool metrics in Datadog. The traces showed that timeouts correlated with a specific region and only when a new “bulk pricing” flag was on. From there, I captured heap snapshots and connection-pool stats in that region and found a subtle connection leak in a rarely hit code path: an error branch that skipped pool.release(). Under heavy load, the pool exhausted and new calls stalled until the ELB timed out. Fixing that and adding a safeguard max wait time dropped 5xx on that endpoint from ~3% to under 0.1%, even during 10x traffic spikes.
Keywords
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.
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.
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?
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?