How would you describe your strongest project, and what questions would you expect about it?

Answer

Project: End-to-End Invest Planning Platform
Sep 2025 – Feb 2026 | Fullstack Python / AI Developer

What it is

A goal-based wealth planning platform with a FastAPI backend and Vue 3 frontend. It covers client onboarding, portfolio and goal tracking, and financial health scoring, with AWS integrations and a compliant AI-powered financial chatbot for regulated advice.

What I delivered

Backend: FastAPI services for RESTful APIs and microservices (onboarding, goals, financial health scoring). PostgreSQL and SQLAlchemy for data models (client, goal, fact-find, audit/consent).
Integrations: Third-party APIs and data feeds—auth, messaging, CRM, JIRA, logging, monitoring. External API clients with auth, retries, and error handling.
AI chatbot: Built and improved an AI chatbot with LangChain/LangGraph: information transformation, tool integration, consent flows, and financial guardrails for regulated advice.
Testing: TDD with Pytest—unit and integration tests for reliability.
Frontend: Vue onboarding, portfolio, and goal management screens.
DevOps: Docker, CI/CD (Bitbucket), and observability (Sentry, logging).

Technologies

Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Pytest, Celery, Redis, AWS (RDS, SNS, SQS, ECR, Cognito), Docker, Bitbucket CI/CD, Sentry, Ably, LangChain, LangGraph, TypeScript, Vue, Pinia, Tailwind, Storybook, Chart.js.

Questions I’d expect

How did you design the AI chatbot for regulated advice (guardrails, consent flows)?
How did you integrate third-party APIs (auth, retries, failure handling)?
How did you structure the FastAPI services and data models?
What was the hardest part of the project?
How did TDD affect the development flow and reliability?
How did you handle compliance and audit/consent records?
How did you coordinate backend, frontend, and AI work?

Interview angle

“Describe your strongest project.” - pick one where you owned a genuinely hard decision, not the one with the biggest name. Structure it as problem, constraints, options you considered, what you chose and why, and the measured outcome.
“What made it strong?” - answer in terms of impact and difficulty, not technology. “We cut p95 from 4s to 900ms and turned provider outages into degraded results instead of incidents” beats a list of frameworks.
“What was your specific contribution?” - be precise about the boundary between what you did and what the team did. Interviewers probe this, and overclaiming collapses quickly under follow-up questions.
“What would you do differently?” - have a real answer ready. Volunteering a genuine limitation, ideally one whose consequences you later saw, is the single highest-value sentence in the story.