Tell me about a time you escalated a problem with a coworker to your manager.

We ran twenty-three nightly reconciliation checks between the source systems and the warehouse, and whoever held the weekly rotation was meant to triage anything that fired. A teammate on the transformation layer kept taking the rotation and then not touching it. By the time I looked properly, 137 alerts were sitting unreviewed, nine of the checks had been silently failing for over a month, and one mart was serving finance with drift nobody had quantified. I spoke to him twice. The first time he said he would catch up that week; the second time I offered to take the rotation off him for a sprint if his load was the problem, and he declined and still did not triage. At that point the finance close was three weeks out and I was not willing to carry an unquantified gap into it. I told him plainly that I was going to raise it in my next one-to-one and that nothing in it would be new to him. Then I brought my manager the alert backlog, the nine broken checks and the close date, and asked for a decision about ownership rather than a conversation about attitude. Ownership moved, the backlog came down to under ten inside a fortnight, and the finance mart reconciled to source within 0.3 percent before the close.

During a warehouse migration my counterpart lead on the analytics side and I deadlocked over how much of the old semantic layer we would carry forward. He kept the cut list open for eleven weeks, re-opening decisions each time his stakeholders pushed back, and my ingestion team was rebuilding against a target that moved weekly. Two of my engineers were on their third rewrite of the same mart. I had tried the direct route: a joint working session, then a written proposal with a decision deadline he let pass. What tipped it was cost I could state — the moving target was burning roughly a third of my team's capacity and putting the freeze window at risk. I called him first and said I was taking it to both our managers, that I would ask for a forcing function rather than for him to be overruled, and offered to write the summary jointly. He edited it before it went. We got a forty-minute meeting, an owner for the decision, and a written interface contract with a date. The final list came in at seventeen of the thirty-four candidate models, drift across the shared marts stayed under 0.4 percent through cutover, and he and I have used that same joint-write-up move twice since.