The behavioral story

What's judged: whether your story shows the skill they asked about, quickly. Engineers often describe drifting from tangent to tangent and finding it hard to compress a technical story into a few sentences. Lead moves: Headline, Own, Reason.

Template: headline first, then STAR (situation, task, action, result), with a number in the result.

"The short version: I resolved a conflict over API ownership by proposing a shared contract, and we shipped two weeks early. Here's what happened…"

Keep the situation under a fifth of your answer. Use "I" for your actions.