Tell me about a time when you struggled to meet a deadline.

At XYZ , while in the middle of the a crucuial migration project, a key resource on my team left the company.

This immediately put the project in Red, I communicated about the change with key resource holders and my manager. I also informed them about next steps.

a) I talked to my manager about the contingency plan

b) There was a senior eng. on my other team, I collobrated with other project PM to get his buyin to reshcuffle the resource.

c) During the 2 week notice period, I negotiated that the exiting resource did Knowledge Transfer

d) I knew that we would not be able to handle all the committed task, so I went an negotiated with PMs to reduce the scope a little to reduce the risk.

By doing all these steps I could meet the timeline with minimal impact. Lesson I learnt was to always have a contingency plan in place. In the end we delivered 90% of the committed tasks.

I led a project to implement a new feature in our loan processing system aimed at reducing API latency for faster loan approvals. Midway, I encountered data inconsistencies and latency issues caused by schema mismatches between the new API and our backend services. To resolve this, I optimized the data schema mapping, streamlined query performance, and introduced Redis caching for frequently accessed data, which significantly reduced the API call frequency and improved response times.

I also collaborated with QA to parallelize testing, allowing us to catch issues early. By continuously optimizing our microservices with adjustments to load balancing and asynchronous data processing, we increased processing speeds by 20%. While the deadline was slightly extended, our enhancements directly improved loan approval times and were a solid technical win for both the team and the user experience.

At SKN , while in the middle of the a crucuial delivery , one of my fellow developer resigned and we were in quite a bit of tight schedule.

a) I talked to my manager about the need reshuffling a resource from other team while the fellow developer was still serving his notice period

b) Made sure that he gave KT to the new fellow regularly and completed the handover of his part

c) I knew that we would not be able to handle all the committed task, so conveyed the situation to my lead to reduce the scope a little to reduce the risk.

By doing all these steps I could meet the timeline with minimal impact. Lesson I learnt was to always have a contingency plan in place. In the end we delivered 90% of the committed tasks.