Welcome to your interview.
The question is on your right: Ship Reliability Upgrade Before Enterprise Launch. Take a moment with it first.
Talk your thinking through with me if you like - when you're confident, submit your answer and I'll grade it like a real screen (7/10 or better passes). Discussion and graded submissions share your five interviewer interactions, so spend them well.
You are the engineering manager for a B2B SaaS workflow platform preparing a major enterprise launch that has already been committed to customers for the end of the quarter. The release includes a new admin permissions model, audit logs, and SCIM provisioning, but the underlying service has accumulated reliability issues: deployment rollback takes 45 minutes, test flakiness is above 12%, and two recent incidents were caused by weak integration coverage in the auth layer. Sales is pushing to keep the full scope because three signed customers represent a meaningful share of next quarter's pipeline, while security and support are arguing that shipping without hardening will create operational risk and damage trust. Your most experienced staff engineer is tied up on a production migration for the first three weeks, and there is no headcount available to extend the team.
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Deadline | 10 weeks to customer launch |
| Engineering team | 6 backend, 2 frontend, 1 QA |
| Current test flakiness | 12% of CI runs |
| Rollback time | 45 minutes |
| Recent Sev-2 incidents | 2 in past 6 weeks |
| Design partner customers | 3 signed enterprise accounts |
| Uptime SLA commitment | 99.9% |
| Additional budget/headcount | None approved |
How would you plan and execute this release so you balance engineering quality with delivery speed, and how would you decide what to harden, what to de-scope, and what launch approach to commit to stakeholders?