Tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical decision made by your team. How did you raise the concern, what steps did you take to influence the decision or adapt to it, and what was the final outcome? What did you learn from that experience?

At my previous company, our six-person backend team decided to use a document DB for a payments flow because it felt faster to iterate. I pushed back because the flow required strong atomicity and the design risked a 30% increase in reconciliation errors. I ran a quick two-day prototype using the relational schema I suggested, wrote a cost/risk comparison, and benchmarked both approaches under peak load. The prototype showed 40% lower latency for the critical path and caught concurrency issues the document DB missed. I presented the data, proposed a hybrid approach, and we adjusted the plan. We shipped on schedule, reduced post-release errors by ~55% in the first month, and avoided a costly rollback. I learned to combine data, small experiments, and clear trade-offs when influencing decisions.