Optimising a Critical System Under a Tight Production SLA

Question

Tell me about a time you had to optimise a production system that was violating its SLA — ideally under pressure with limited time for a perfect solution.

What this round evaluates

• Systematic approach: profiling before optimising
• Pragmatism: finding the 20% of changes that give 80% of improvement
• Communication: did you keep stakeholders informed while fixing?
• Post-fix: did you add monitoring so this won't silently regress?

Strong answer structure

1. System and SLA (what was the target vs actual?)
2. How you diagnosed the bottleneck
3. The fix(es) in priority order
4. Outcome in numbers
5. Observability improvements made afterward