BackendDevOps/CloudHigh signal
Backpressure
Also written as Flow Control, Load Shedding
Deliberately slowing or rejecting incoming work when a system is overloaded, so it degrades predictably instead of collapsing.
Think of it like
A kitchen that stops taking orders when the pass is full, rather than accepting them all and serving everything cold.
Junior or senior?
A strong senior signal. Junior engineers add capacity; senior ones design what happens when capacity runs out anyway.
Ask them
“What did your system do when it received more traffic than it could handle?”