Your service calls three third-party APIs. Give me your timeout and retry policy, and defend the numbers.
Answer it out loud before you open anything. The value of the flags below is in comparing them to what you actually said.
The situation behind the question
One dependency is a payment provider, one is an address-lookup service, one is an internal service owned by another team. All three are called during a single user-facing request.
What it is really testing
Whether the candidate treats timeouts and retries as a coupled budget rather than two independent settings, and whether they distinguish operations that are safe to retry from errors that are classed as retryable.