Your question is Scale a Critical Engineering System. 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 high-traffic internal platform that supports order processing and downstream reporting across multiple business units. Traffic has doubled in the last two quarters, and the system now sees recurring latency spikes, occasional queue backlogs, and two reliability incidents per month that affect business users. Leadership wants the platform to support the next growth phase without a major rewrite, while Finance is pushing to keep infra spend flat and the product team is asking for new features in the same release window.
How do you ensure scalability and reliability in the systems your team builds?