The STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) is a structured approach to answering behavioral interview questions. It helps you provide a comprehensive and compelling response by outlining the context, your responsibility, the steps you took, and the outcome.

Exemplar Story: It was a Friday evening, around 8 PM, and I was the most senior engineer online when our primary e-commerce API, responsible for order processing, suddenly went completely down. This meant immediate revenue loss and significant customer impact, putting our entire weekend sales at risk. My immediate task was to lead the incident response, restore service as quickly as possible, manage stakeholder communications, and ensure we captured lessons learned for a post-mortem. I immediately declared a Level 1 incident, opened a dedicated bridge, and messaged the few engineers who were online. I quickly assessed their availability and skill sets: John, a backend engineer, and Sarah, familiar with our infrastructure. I delegated specific tasks: John to check recent deployments and API logs, Sarah to verify network connectivity and database health, while I took on overall coordination, troubleshooting guidance, and external communication. I established a clear internal communication channel and began sending regular, concise updates to stakeholders, including our CEO and Head of Sales, outlining the impact, current status, and estimated time to resolution. As troubleshooting progressed, it became clear a recent configuration change was the culprit. I made the call to roll back the change immediately, which required careful coordination. Once the fix was deployed, I personally verified the system's stability before confirming resolution. Throughout, I maintained a calm demeanor to keep the team focused and efficient. Before signing off for the night, I scheduled a post-mortem for Monday morning, outlining initial data points to gather. We successfully restored the API within 2 hours, significantly minimizing the projected revenue loss. Stakeholders expressed appreciation for the transparent and timely communication, which maintained trust despite the disruption. The post-mortem session led to critical improvements in our deployment process and monitoring tools, preventing similar incidents in the future and strengthening our incident response protocol.