Video Screening

Senior Backend Engineer · Round 1 screening

Candidate 3 of 47

Q2

SCREENING PROMPT 2 OF 3

Walk us through a time you debugged a production incident under pressure. What was the root cause?

James Okafor 2:34

1080p

1:18 / 2:34 1.5×

Q1 · INTRO

Background & experience

0:00 – 0:54

Q2 · SCENARIO

Production incident

0:54 – 1:58

Q3 · FIT

Why this role

1:58 – 2:34

Transcript Auto-generated Full transcript

0:58 …so we had a cascading failure in the payments service right before a peak window.

1:18 I traced it to a connection-pool exhaustion — a retry storm was opening far more connections than the database could hold.

1:32 I added exponential backoff and a circuit breaker, then wrote a postmortem so the team…

James Okafor

Senior Backend Engineer · 7 yrs

MATCH

92

RÉSUMÉ SUMMARYView full

•7 yrs backend at Stripe & a Series-B fintech — Go, Kubernetes, Postgres

•Led the payments-platform migration handling $400M/yr

•BSc Computer Science, University of Lagos

Go ✓ Kubernetes ✓ Distributed systems ✓ GraphQL ~

AI VIDEO SUMMARY

Clearly articulated a real production incident with a precise root cause (connection-pool exhaustion). Strong systems thinking and ownership — described both the fix and a follow-up postmortem. Communication is concise and structured.

Specific example Clear structure Ownership

YOUR SCORING

Communication clarity

Relevant experience

Confidence & professionalism

RECRUITER NOTES

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