Your service makes synchronous calls to an external service that sometimes responds very slowly or with errors. How do you keep that from taking your service down?
~4 min by voice
How to approach it
This checks whether you understand how a dependency's failure or slowdown cascades into your service, and whether you can apply resilience patterns: timeouts, retries, circuit breaker, bulkhead, fallback. The point isn't just to name them but to explain when each one helps and when it hurts.
The interviewer will ask this question and listen. Think out loud and ask for a hint if you need one. When you're done, pause or tap “That's my answer”. In about a minute, your score and the points you covered show up here.