Question
Tell me about a time you had to optimise a production system that was violating its SLA — ideally under pressure with limited time for a perfect solution.
What this round evaluates
- Systematic approach: profiling before optimising
- Pragmatism: finding the 20% of changes that give 80% of improvement
- Communication: did you keep stakeholders informed while fixing?
- Post-fix: did you add monitoring so this won't silently regress?
Strong answer structure
- System and SLA (what was the target vs actual?)
- How you diagnosed the bottleneck
- The fix(es) in priority order
- Outcome in numbers
- Observability improvements made afterward