Tell me about a time you led a backend initiative (e.g., migrating a service, introducing a new architecture pattern, or standardizing practices) that required coordinating other engineers and influencing priorities. How did you set the technical direction, gain buy-in, and ensure effective execution over time?

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VirtualInterview.AI · Accepted Answer

At my last company, I led an initiative to move our monolithic order processing into a set of backend services. The monolith was causing 20–30 minute deploy windows and frequent outages for our ~3M monthly users. I drafted a technical RFC proposing a domain-based service split, standard gRPC interfaces, and a shared auth library, and circulated it with a small working group of 5 senior engineers for feedback. We aligned on success metrics up front: under 5-minute deploys and zero downtime migrations.

To get broader buy-in, I hosted short design walkthroughs with each product team, showing how the new pattern would reduce their lead time by ~40%. I negotiated with PMs to carve out 20% capacity for three quarters and kept an architecture roadmap visible in Jira. We ran one pilot service first, published migration playbooks, and did weekly check-ins. Within 9 months, we’d carved out 6 services, cut deploy time to 4 minutes, and reduced release-related incidents by about 60%.

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