The most comprehensive bank Interview Answer Review tooling available online.

I was working with 5 customers at once, and had to focus on those activities where I could make a difference, make the most impact, that I could not delegate, and where I could balance with other priorities - in order to do that, I measured the priority of the tasks by the cost of delay, in other words, the impact of not doing them at that time. Then, with more clarity about the priorities, I thought which ones I could delegate to other team members, and if that made sense, with the required support and guidance from my side. Working as a team and not trying to get everything done yourself is key in the long term with multiple, competing priorities. Then, organizing my time well in short, focused timeslots for the most important tasks, made a difference.

First, I will analyze what the needs of this group of users are. Starting from their needs, I will think about whether there are any breakthrough points to achieve more profits.

Second, I will consider whether meeting these needs and achieving more benefits will harm other users, as well as what countermeasures can be taken.

Having a long-term goal clearly set, breaking it down into near-term goals helps visualize our progress and what is expected on a day-to-day basis. By hitting the near-term goals I'll understand and grasp the depth, gain insights from the stakeholders, and would be able to achieve the long-term goal. setting near-term goals also help analyze trade-offs along the way

while reviewing one of the older projects that was currently implemented in the company I noticed that there was no alerting in place if the data pipeline breaks, the data pipeline has never been broken and it never failed for the last 2 years. it was a pipeline where the data would be dropped into an sftp bucket by the customer every hour and then it was moved to an s3 bucket where s3 triggers were implemented to moved the data in to queue. So in case there is an issue with the data not being processed we would only know when the we see a drop in volume. I identified it as a potential issue with the system and worked on a proposal to have monitoring in place so we are notified when there is an error. I worked with the program manager and devised a plan on how to implement the alerting and the time lines as well as the effort that will be needed to implement it. I mapped the impact of not having it to the current goals of the company and then put forward a proposal of implementing the alerts to the business and took their buyins. after getting the buyins I proposed the task to my team and some of the sr devlopers were not too keen on implenting the alerts, I gave the task to some of the Jr devlopers and the alerts were implemented. after the implementation we discovered that for some hrs in a day we werent getting any files so instead of getting 24 files in a day we were getting 20 files a day in an average. This was rectified by talking to the customer and the missing data was solved. but this made the whole team realize the importance of monitoring and alerting. It also bosted the moral of the Jr developers seeing the direct impact they made to the business goals

With a major product launch on the horizon, expecting to triple the user load. The infrastructure was non-optimized for demand and incident response was non-harmonious across teams with no set process.

As the SRE Manager, I'd have to implement project changes to infrastructure to accommodate high availability and scalability. I discovered a long-standing issue surrounding incident response and observability that would make it all the more difficult to achieve reliability under pressure and peak traffic.

Therefore, instead of fulfilling the project requirements as presented, I became an advocate for change across the organization. I established an observability platform with 100% stack coverage, created custom SLOs/SLIs/error budgets to enhance performance and reliability visibility, drafted and socialized an incident management playbook across the company and held hands-on trainings for all respective teams. In addition, I advocated for Terraform for Infrastructure as Code to help with deployment time and held FinOps reviews to help eliminate redundant costs in cloud spend.

As a result, we did not only survive the 3X traffic upon product launch with zero critical incidents, but we also achieved 15% saves the following years in cloud costs and 40% faster deployments. Many of the processes I created were adopted as company-wide best practices.

Problem: company-wide focus shift came with the layoff. Instead of global expansion, the company steer towards operation efficiency. My team need to drop projects for expansion and aggressively prioritize cost reduction projects. Action: I was invited to a meeting with eng and product leaders to fully understand the reason and new goals for the shift; I also made sure I understood how the new priorities aligned with the company’s plan to success. Then for each sub-team owning a sub-area, I explained the company’s plan to success under the new macro economy, new strategy of operating with efficiency and impact on the team’s roadmap. I had 1-1s with eng to make sure they bought into the new vision and plan. Some eng had doubts in some of the new operational goals - for doubts on technical goals I had deep dive sessions with engineers to assure them that the goals are realistic and reasonable; for doubts on company’s mission I explained to them that the realignment is just a temporary set up and that focusing on operation efficiency in short term would better prepare us for the company’s vision in the long run. I also shared the new focus for other teams and how they fit into the company’s new plan to success along with our teams’. Results: the team was in general aligned on the new vision, some even said that it made more sense than the previous one; the team switched gear to execute the refined project roadmap within 2 weeks.