Describe a time when you had to work with a team to solve a complex problem. What was your role, and how did the team approach the problem?

Situation: A critical pipeline was failing during peak load, causing 4–6 hour data delays for downstream systems and threatening SLAs. Task: Identify root cause, fix it, and prevent recurrence. Action: I led a cross-functional task force (data engineers, DBAs, platform). We (1) profiled Spark stages and found severe shuffle skew—one key had 80% of data. (2) Implemented salting to redistribute the hot key. (3) Optimized target database indexes and batch sizes. (4) Ran load tests in staging before production deployment. I coordinated the rollout, documented the pattern, and added monitoring for skew recurrence. Result: Pipeline runtime improved by 60%; we met SLAs during the next peak. The skew-handling pattern was adopted for 3 other pipelines. We avoided a $50K SLA penalty.