Can you describe a time when you faced a major setback at work and how you recovered from it?
Apple
Palantir Technologies
Asana
Stripe
Microsoft
Apple
Palantir Technologies
Asana
Stripe
Microsoft
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3 answers from the community
Anonymous
I was the lead engineer on a project to enhance our event-driven messaging system. The system processes real-time messages and archives them into S3 buckets. These archived messages are then ingested by another team into Snowflake, which serves as the backbone for various downstream pipelines and analytics reporting.
We recently implemented an update to the S3 archiver to write data to multi-region buckets based on the message-producing country. This was a crucial update aimed at improving data redundancy and compliance with regional data regulations.
While the deployment of the multi-region S3 buckets was successful, I overlooked the need to inform the Snowflake team about the changes. As a result, their ingestor continued to point to the old S3 buckets, causing Snowflake to go out of sync. This led to a cascading failure in all downstream processes, including inaccurate analytics reporting and failed data pipelines.
The mistake led to significant disruptions in downstream processes, with incorrect reports being generated for critical business decisions. Once I realized the oversight, I immediately coordinated with the Snowflake team to update their ingestor to point to the correct S3 buckets. After the fix, I took steps to ensure better communication and coordination between teams, including setting up a process for notifying all stakeholders of changes that could impact their systems. This experience reinforced the importance of cross-team communication, especially in environments where multiple systems are interdependent.
This scenario effectively demonstrates your ability to own up to a mistake, address it quickly, and learn from the experience. It also highlights the complexity of the systems you're working with and your role in leading such projects. By discussing how you implemented better communication protocols afterward, you show your growth as a senior engineer who is proactive in preventing similar issues in the future
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Anonymous
I was reviewing product test results with the customer to get sign-off on proceeding to the next phase of building and testing. The results that were being shown were consistent with previous results that we had reviewed with the customer in earlier phases. Upon finishing our review, there were several engineers on the customer side that were not OK with the results and wanted us to make a change in order to better fit in with the specifications. I stated that these results and measurements were agreed upon in earlier reviews and and making a change this late in the process could push the timeline back to where we may not be able to meet production schedule. At this point the customer engineer's asked if I had the signed documents to showcase that this is what had been agreed to. I only had verbal and email communications with agreements but nothing with a signature. Since there was no signature, my team was forced to provide a fix under a short time constraint. As the project engineer/manager it is my job to ensure that proper documentation is had and follow to avoid situations like these. I took this as a learned lesson to never get too comfortable with the customer and the key importance of documentation. I have since, made certain that proper documentation is there for all stages of the project that I work on.
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Anonymous
When buildling the next generation instance, during the planning phase I budget the amount of servers we will launch the product with. Given each server cost was over 2 million dollar I biased to towards frugality and provided a bare minimum number of server we could launch with. But what I completely missed was during the developement some servers will end up in bad state and the engineering team will short of servers to test the software and firmware getting built which made meeting the project timeline riskly and heavily dependent on delivery schedules of servers and them staying healthy. This quickly became a bottleneck that I realized. I quickly put togther a plan to request adittional server and provide a detailed breakdown on where and how these would be used during and after developement. Synced with the hardware and ODM team and executives to get a approval and ordered the parts to get the servers and racks build at ODM.
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Interview question asked to Data Science Managers, Data Engineering Managers, ML Engineering Managers and other roles interviewing at Apple, Braintree, DigitalOcean and others: Can you describe a time when you faced a major setback at work and how you recovered from it?.