Tell me about a time you failed. How did you deal with it?
Whether you can own a real failure without either minimising it or performing contrition.
BehaviouralStandard
What a strong answer does
Pick a failure that would still sound like a failure if the interviewer retold it to someone else. The strongest stories are not catastrophes, but they are real: you shipped a change that caused an outage, you chose an architecture that forced a rewrite, you missed a dependency and blocked another team, or you let ambiguity persist until a customer escalation happened. Avoid stories where the real culprit is another team, an impossible deadline, or a manager who ignored you.