Tell me about a time you took a risk.

In one of my organizations, I was working on a SaaS-based product and was assigned a task that required thorough investigation to identify and implement a better solution. After conducting initial research, I developed a proof of concept (POC) for a specific solution that seemed viable.

However, during the implementation of the POC into the actual codebase, I encountered some challenges. The issues were complex, and there was very limited documentation or support available to address them. Instead of abandoning the approach, I decided to take a calculated risk by exploring customizations and unconventional solutions to make the implementation work.

After several iterations and testing, the customized solution successfully resolved the issues. It was reviewed and approved by the engineering manager and ultimately integrated into the product. This experience not only reinforced my problem-solving skills but also demonstrated the importance of persistence and thinking outside the box when tackling unforeseen challenges.

So I'd say the time I took the risk was, I actually went against the recommendation of my manager. Not directly, but essentially I was put on a project at Niagara and I was looking at a lot of the contract amendments and I analyzed our contract negotiation with Uber. And so as I was looking at the whole data, trying to see the discrepancies and really seeing, okay, what lanes should we negotiate, seeing what are the terms of negotiation that we should use, and then finally, I wanted to also forecast on terms of a long-term growth. So not just necessarily for just this term, but see how that would last for the future quarters as well. So kind of taking those into consideration while I put them all out into a matrix and showed the team, the director, and a lot of my team was thinking that we should go with the option that saves us the most amount of money. I'll put the $700,000 to $800,000 for the quarter, implementing this new amendment that I actually disagreed. And I suggested we just take somewhere closer to about the $600,000 range because for two reasons, one, I noticed that the lanes that we included in the $600,000 would lead to better client relations with Uber as a long-term and one of our biggest carriers. And two, I also noticed that in the long run, we actually would save a little more just because in the future quarters with seasonality to keep into account, those lanes were not always going to save us the most amount of money. So maybe while the $700,000 to $800,000 option would save us that much in the first quarter, when it comes down to the winter, it would save us only about $300,000 versus the $600,000 option is a little more consistent throughout the seasons. And so we actually noticed that in terms of a long-term growth for the year, we would save a lot more. So that was a time where I kind of took a risk to go against and maybe recommend something slightly different than my manager. But I think the director, when he heard me say these things, he took those into consideration and saw my analysis and saw that I was able to back up kind of my decisions and this type of risk to making sure I'm minimizing it as much as possible. So I think that was something that he really appreciated and that the VP of supply chain ended up deciding to work towards.

There was I time I had to choose between technologies for our clusters: nomad or kubernetes. I did not know back then that one of them would become so much popular than the other, but because of a good research I was able to pick better option