Details

Interview Time:  
October 5, 2025 11:00 AM
Targeted Company:  
Targeted Level:  
Junior/Mid/Senior

Record

Record Link:  
Record

Feedback

John demonstrated senior-level ownership and breadth. He framed the project with recency, team context, and product vision; partnered effectively across use-case and tooling teams; and presented an evolving technical approach backed by clear prioritization. The scope, impact, and leadership signals align with Senior SDE expectations (potentially higher).

Strengths

  • Strong opening: Clear intros, recent context, team name and vision.
  • Business alignment: Storage/tooling context mapped to top priorities.
  • Appropriate scope: 5-dev team (including you) with crisp role delineation.
  • Technical clarity: Well-structured diagram; original → improved approach evolution.
  • Collaboration: Effective cross-team partnerships across use cases and tooling.
  • Prioritization depth: Stated challenges and articulated decision rules clearly.
  • Breadth without rabbit holes: Left room for interviewer-driven deep dives.
  • Leadership signal: Clear lead-engineer responsibilities and measurable impact, including cost savings.

Areas to Improve

  • Slide flow & story arc: Re-organize into:
    1. Problem (user stories, pain points, goal)
    2. Requirements with metrics
    3. Options & decision trade-offs
    4. System architecture
    5. Challenges (invite deep dives)
    6. Impact & learnings
  • Conciseness: Target ~10 slides (current ~12) and reduce dense text.
  • Team roles: Briefly call out others’ responsibilities to spotlight your leadership.
  • Explicit goal: You have a problem statement—add a one-line success goal.
  • Planning & sequencing: Describe your planning contributions and how you handled non-sequential, parallelized work.
  • Timeline clarity: 15 months across 5 devs—translate to engineering months/weeks when helpful.
  • Strategic framing before design: State the strategy and alternative solutions you considered before presenting the chosen design.
  • Diagram titling & mapping: Add slide titles (e.g., “Proposal,” “Final Architecture”) and highlight which diagram regions correspond to each proposal element.
  • Early alignment: Upfront “feature checklist” (e.g., self-serve configuration) to align expectations and show value.
  • Challenge signposting: Label explicitly (e.g., “Challenge 1: Async load generation,” “Challenge 2: Data generation & tracking”) to keep the audience oriented.
  • Core technical depth: Surface 2–3 hard technical problems that best demonstrate your senior expertise and how you solved them.
  • Success metrics: Pair each requirement with a measurable KPI (e.g., false-positive rate, throughput, SLOs) and note how you tracked it.

Suggested Next Steps

  1. Re-cut the deck to 10 slides using the flow above; trim text to headlines + visual aids.
  2. Add a role slide (RACI-style bullets) to highlight your leadership + others' responsibility.
  3. Insert an “Options vs Decision” slide with a quick pros/cons table and rationale.
  4. Create a “Challenges & Deep Dives” slide listing a real technical challenge you’re ready to tackle.
  5. Attach metrics to requirements (e.g., FP/FN targets, p95 latency, cost per X) and show how you measured them and defined your project success ahead of time.