Your question is Balance Debt Against Maintainability. Take a moment with it on the right.
Talk me through your thinking if you like. When you're confident, submit your answer and I'll grade it like a real screen (7/10 or better passes).
You are the Engineering Manager for a B2B staffing platform shipping a high-priority candidate matching release. The fastest path uses older services and a few shortcuts, but that choice will make future changes harder and debugging more expensive. Product wants the release this quarter, sales has already committed it to prospects, and the platform team is warning that the codebase is already fragile.
How do you think about technical debt versus long-term maintainability?