Behavioral

What was your most innovative idea?

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Expert Answer

Anonymous

4.6Exceptional
  1. Situation: Our cloud bill had been steadily increasing, but engineering teams lacked visibility into which workloads were driving the cost. Leadership wanted accountability, but SREs like me knew that finger-pointing wouldn’t solve anything without data.
  2. Task:I wanted to design a way to give each team ownership of their spend — without adding operational overhead — while also uncovering unused or over-provisioned infrastructure.
  3. Action:I built an internal “cost dashboard” that pulled billing data from our cloud provider’s API, tagged resources by team and environment, and visualized it by service, team, and project. But the innovative part was integrating it with our CI/CD workflows: before a PR deploying new infra could be merged, it would estimate the monthly cost impact. I also built a Slack bot that sent weekly team-level cost summaries and flagged idle resources.
  4. Result: Within two months, teams identified and shut down $8,000/month in unused dev resources. More importantly, it shifted the culture — infra cost became part of architectural discussions. Finance even started using our dashboard during quarterly planning instead of relying solely on billing exports.

Anonymous

4Strong
Another person on my team came up with the idea to create a demo of our application running in a web browser, by cross-compiling the Go application into WebAssembly, showing how lightweight the user-application was. Our marketing team really loved this concept, and we decided to do it.

I was tasked with creating a way for our frontend team to interact with the Go backend that the application was written in. Our frontend team needed a way to easily call functions within our application, and so I worked very closely with one of our frontend engineers to design and create a TypeScript package that provided an easy-to-use API wrapper for the application.

This wrapper significantly reduced friction between the frontend and backend components, and made maintaining the application super easy.

I enjoyed working on this wrapper, as it required me to work closely with my team and members of the frontend team - I also learned a lot about the WebAssembly runtime in browsers and how to best design TypeScript APIs that can be called easily from our React frontend.
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Interview question asked to Full Stack Software Engineers, Technical Program Managers, Data Scientists and other roles interviewing at Course Hero, Noom, Tradeshift and others: What was your most innovative idea?.