Candidate report · Acme Robotics
Priya Raghavan
Senior Backend Engineer · applied 2026-07-02 · priya@example.com
Hiring brief
Priya is a strong match for the Senior Backend Engineer role. Six years of Python in production, deep PostgreSQL experience including a painful partitioning migration she owned end to end, and clear, honest written communication. Her AWS depth is narrower than the posting asks for (mostly ECS + RDS), and she hasn't run Kafka at scale — she says so herself, which is a good sign. Interview answers were specific and self-critical, with the strongest response on production debugging.
Strengths
- Owned a live PostgreSQL partitioning migration on a 2TB table with zero downtime — described trade-offs unprompted
- Debugging answer walked through a real incident (connection pool exhaustion) with correct root-cause reasoning
- Writes clearly and admits limits — said 'I haven't done this at scale' twice where most candidates bluff
- Salary and notice period fit the stated budget and timeline
Weaknesses
- AWS experience is ECS/RDS-centric; no Terraform or infrastructure-as-code evidence
- Kafka listed on resume but interview answer suggests conceptual familiarity only
Verify before an offer
- Verify Kafka depth in a live conversation — resume overstates it slightly
- One medium integrity flag (30s tab switch on Q3) — likely benign, worth a casual mention
Application answers
- What is your expected salary / compensation?
- ₹38–42 LPA
- What is your notice period — when could you start?
- 45 days
- Are you willing to work from the office as required?
- Yes
Resume screening — evidence per must-have skill
| Python | strong | 6 years across two roles; 'rebuilt the billing service in Python/FastAPI, 40k req/min' — concrete and verifiable. |
| PostgreSQL | strong | 'Led zero-downtime partitioning of a 2TB events table' — exactly the depth the role needs. |
| AWS | partial | ECS and RDS in production; no IaC, networking, or multi-account evidence. |
| Kafka | partial | Listed under skills but no project detail anywhere in the resume — verify in interview. |
Transferable experience: Built internal tooling for schema migrations — adjacent to the platform work this role owns.
Round 1: AI written interview — sample answer
Q2: Walk me through a production incident you personally debugged. What was the root cause, and what did you change afterwards? (9/10)
"Our checkout API started timing out every day around 6pm. Metrics showed DB connections pegged at the pool max. I traced it to a report job that grabbed connections and held them across an external API call — under evening load that starved checkout. Short term we moved the job to its own pool; the real fix was making the external call after releasing the connection. Afterwards I added pool saturation alerts at 70%. The lesson that stuck: never hold a connection across network I/O."
Evaluator: specific incident, correct root-cause chain, includes the durable lesson — this is what strong looks like.
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