You're joining Kestrel as Engineering Manager for the Payments Reliability team — 7 engineers (5 mid-level, 2 senior) responsible for the payment-retry and reconciliation systems for a mid-market B2B invoicing platform. Kestrel has ~90 customers and is under real pressure to prove it can scale past its early-adopter base.
Three weeks ago, the team missed a launch date for a rearchitected retry system — the third slip in two quarters. The VP of Engineering has asked you to walk in Monday with a diagnosis and a recovery plan: "I don't need excuses. I need to know what happened, what you're doing about it, and how you're going to prevent it next time."
What you know:
| Signal | Detail |
|---|---|
| Sprint velocity (last 6 sprints) | 42, 38, 40, 29, 24, 22 points — declining trend |
| Root cause (from the incident writeup) | The retry-queue redesign was scoped assuming a library upgrade that turned out to be incompatible with the existing event schema; this was discovered in week 3 of a 5-week build, forcing a mid-project redesign |
| On-call load (last 90 days) | 14 pages, up from 5 in the prior quarter; 9 of the 14 trace back to the same underlying retry-queue instability |
| 1:1 notes (your predecessor's, handed to you) | One senior engineer (on the team 3 years) has stopped volunteering for design reviews and their code review comments have gotten notably terser over the last 6 weeks; no documented conversation about it |
| Team composition ask | A mid-level engineer has directly asked you, in your first week, for "more ownership" and mentioned they're weighing an offer elsewhere |
| Product's ask | The VP of Product wants the retry system relaunched within 4 weeks and has said the timeline is "the one thing the board is watching" |
You have 45 minutes to diagnose what's driving the pattern and build a recovery plan.
We expect you to use AI tools. We evaluate how you use them — not whether you use them. Evidence of iteration, redirection, and critical evaluation scores higher than a polished output with no process documentation.
The single highest-signal indicator: your video answer to the mandatory AI question. If you cannot name a specific moment where you redirected AI output, evaluators will assume you did not.
Mandatory AI question for your video: Walk me through one moment where you disagreed with, pushed back on, or redirected what the AI gave you — and what you did instead. Name the specific moment. Explain what the AI produced that didn't meet the bar, what you did differently, and why.
Video guidance for this role: Speak naturally and conversationally, as if you're briefing your VP of Engineering directly. We're listening for the quality of your sequencing logic and your people judgment — not verbal polish.
Submission: Upload each deliverable as a separate file directly on the Provn platform: your Recovery Plan, your README document (Sections A, B, and C), and your video walkthrough (MP4 or MOV).
Demonstrate the ability to diagnose a multi-signal delivery problem and sequence a recovery plan against a real capacity constraint
Show technical judgment — identifying risk and assigning failure-mode ownership — without over-rotating into implementation detail
Address a people-leadership situation honestly, including the cost of the approach chosen, not a conflict-free narrative
Communicate a technical trade-off in terms a non-technical stakeholder can act on
Show how you worked with AI to accelerate your process — including at least one moment where you redirected it
On this page
