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Behavioral
What would you consider your biggest accomplishments in your current role?
Full Stack Software EngineerData Science ManagerEngineering ManagerUX Designer

Applied Materials

Tableau Logo

Tableau

N26 Logo

N26

+5

I believe my biggest achievement is building a high performing team amongst a lot of chaos. I started as an engineering manager for replenishment team, soon due to restructuring I was asked to lead a different BU called Parcel and I was given the team from scratch, 8 months into this I heard the leadership is deciding to put Parcel on KTLO and give me a new tier 1 service called channels. This service was highly unstable with a lot of issues and tech debt. This service was transitioned among 4 engg manager in past three years (4th me). 

TASK

My job was to do a successful transition of this service and keep the team motivated

Actions

- When I got to. know about Parcel KTLO and having a new product under me, I wanted to ensure this is communicated to the team clearly with empathy and I wanted to ensure the team that this will only benefit their growth

- I started with a team meeting, shared a couple of wins that we did in parcel, shared even though we did so much, Parcel is being put on KTLO for various xyz reasons.

- I told them every crisis situation is an opportunity and by channels coming under us, we can showcase that even the toughest of the services can be maintained if the tech debt is continuously addressed

- Post team meeting I kept 1:1 with every member and listened them, helped answer their questions

- A couple of team members did share that they felt proud about what they developed in Parcel and were feeling sad that it was going in KTLO.

- I shared that products coming in KTLO happens sometime and this in no way reflects the teams performance, infact our teams reputation is very good amongst the leaders thats why they have given us the most important service (which is also in the worst shape)

- Under previous engg managers there was minimal to no improvement in the service on tech and product side because they were busy fixing on call issues

- I worked with the team to fix this by assigning ywo people to on call and rest two on fixing the issues from root cause. 

- In a couple of months this gave us brwating space since the oncall issues reduced directly impacting reduction in customer queries

- We got appreciated by leadership for this

Result

- Team members were highly motivated

- Learnt a lot

- Got appreciated by leadership for this hard works

8 months ago
Behavioral
What's a time you showed ownership
Full Stack Software EngineerTechnical Program ManagerSoftware EngineerProduct Manager

Applied Materials

ApplyBoard Logo

ApplyBoard

Naspers Logo

Naspers

+11

At my current job one of our biggest customer raised the  issue they were facing in our notification service. The issue was they were not receiving any notifications from our system on their new infrastructure. Their production infra was working fine.

I reviewed their configuration and everything was looking fine at the same time we hadn't done any changes to on our end which could cause this issue. Since their contract was up for renewal the issue, we needed quick resolution. I setup a live debugging session with customer to understand the issue in detail and their new infrastructure. After the first call it was clear that the issue was happening during https handshake or at network layer. To keep the momentum going I setup recurring call with with them and assured them that we are treating this as a high priority. On the next call I involved our security expert and SRE team for further debugging. However the issue not futher progress was made, at this point I insisted SRE team that we contact Azure support to understand if there is any issue at the tcp layer. Azure team looked at the turned on debug logs and found that our network was default MTU (maximum transmission unit) was higher than customers network MTU and customer network was dropping packets.

Finally I worked with SRE team to lower our MTU to match the customer configuration and ran tests. After the config change issue was resolved, our customer confirmed that they could see the notifications. This was really difficult issue I had ran across but I worked with various teams to get to the bottom of it and delivered results to customers satisfaction.

9 months ago
Behavioral
Which of your accomplishments is most significant?
Full Stack Software EngineerProgram ManagerFrontend EngineerData Scientist

Applied Materials

Cognizant Logo

Cognizant

Babylon Health Logo

Babylon Health

+5

During my career I manage a large number of projects, but one of the most challenging ones was the development and launch of a Telematic Control Unit for an important car maker in Japan. The project is important to me due to technical challenges we faced, the skills I applied and the impact on the company.

As Program manager my role was to lead a cross-functional team including Design Engineers, SW Engineers, Operations teams, Material procurement teams, quality and logistics, among others to successfully launch the product to mass production.

First, I kicked-off the project. For that, I shared with the team the project scope, the goals to achieve, I shared the project plan with key milestones and defined the roles and responsibilities for the different team members.

During execution, to maintain a clear communication, I set up design review sessions with the entire engineering organization to ensure everyone was aligned and fixing potential issues in advance. Besides, I led a weekly core-team meeting where we assigned tasks to team members, and setting clear deadlines for each task. To make these tasks easier to manage, I made sure tasks were broken down into manageable sizes with clear descriptions and acceptance criteria. This helped the team to stay focus on their deliveries and maintain speed.

Another important part was to manages Risks. I worked with the team to identify and classify possible risk that might impact to the project deliverables. We defined a Risk matrix to monitor during the development process, and also a project board with the main KPIs to achieve during each stage of the project.

To ensure quality, we defined different testing processes focused on the design, and the process. We installed specific quality check for the documents and devices delivered for each of the milestones of the PDP, as well as a clear quality control in mass production.

Finally, for transparency, I reported on monthly basis to our company leaders and customer about the project status, focusing on Timing, cost, quality and scope.

By employing these strategies, we successfully launched our module on time matching with all the requirements defined by our customer. This was a great example of teamworking, and taught me the importance of breaking down large projects into smaller and easy to manage pieces. Transparent and clear communication was also a great lesson learned. This approach helped me to improve in leading teams through complex problems.

10 months ago

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*All interview questions are submitted by recent Applied Materials Full Stack Software Engineer candidates, labelled and categorized by Prepfully, and then published after being verified by Full Stack Software Engineers at Applied Materials.