It was September 2021 when I started to look for an Engineering Manager position in Amsterdam and remotely. I was on the job market for the first time in 4 years, so it was both exciting and scary. I knew what to expect from technical interviews for developers. But what should I expect from mostly behavioural and situational interviews for engineering managers and how I can prepare? I refreshed my knowledge of the STAR response technique and my memory about the projects I was working on.
After several interviews, I was frustrated because I felt that when I need to come up on the fly with some specific case of my work I was not always able to provide the best applicable example. Thus creating a wrong or not a full picture of my expertise and experience. For example, when I was applying for the role of the manager for the track consisting of several teams but told about my achievements on the level of one team, I got the feedback that the interviewer didn’t see the required level of seniority for the role. If I prepared for Interview questions for an Engineering Manager in advance, I would provide examples that better describe my experience working on the beyond a team level.
My insights about the preparation for behavioural and situational interviews
So my main insights after several interviews were:
- It’s important to prepare the STAR replies for the most common behavioural and situational questions before the interview
- replies for the same questions could and should be different depending on a specific role and company to represent cases best matching the opportunity
I decided to summarise my experience by creating the list of Interview questions for an Engineering Manager. How to use this list?
- To prepare yourself for the Engineering Manager interview
- To reflect on your experience and your professional being from time to time
- To interview people for an Engineering Manager role
I split the list into three categories that constitute the work of engineering managers: People / Process / Technology. I also added a category regarding motivation as some companies put a lot of focus on it.
Interview questions for an Engineering Manager about Motivation
- Why did you decide to become an Engineering Manager and to stay in this role?
- What kind of goals motivate you? The same questions might be asked from a different perspective: If you would build your own company, what kind of company would it be and what value will it bring to society?
- What kind of leader are you?
- Can you tell about feedback that had a big impact on your career? Who gave it to you and how? What did you do with it?
- What is something you want to improve in yourself?
- How would your team describe you?
- What new did you recently learn? How do you develop yourself?
- What is your biggest failure as a manager?
- What is your biggest achieved milestone as a manager?
The last 2 questions are extremely interesting and important. The biggest achievements and failures represent on which scope and level we are working. It shows what type of challenges you as an EM was exposed to. I would advise thinking carefully through them.
Interview questions for an Engineering Manager about People
- How would you structure a new team?
- How would you hire people? What is your checklist? What kind of questions do you ask and what kind of people would you look for?
- How do you measure the success of a team? What successful team looks like?
- How do you measure the happiness of the team?
- How do you make a team be efficient/productive?
- How do you ensure diversity in your team? What diversity means to you?
- How do you measure direct reports performance?
- Have you managed a low performer individual? What did you do?
- How do you develop your direct reports?
- What are the characteristics of good 1-1s?
- How do you handle conflict situations?
- Provide an example of successfully mentoring someone. Which result did it bring? Provide an example when it didn’t go successfully and the challenge of the person was not resolved.
- What is the hardest person/situation you needed to deal with?
Interview questions for an Engineering Manager about Process
- Tell about the time you needed to make organisational change
- Tell about the time when the team’s morale fall down. What did you do?
- Tell about the case when you needed to present a new idea and get people on board
- Tell about the case when you needed to analyse a lot of information in order to make a decision
- Tell about the complex project with a lot of parties involved which you needed to execute towards the goal. How did you do that?
- Tell about the time you improved collaboration
Interview questions for an Engineering Manager about Technology
- How do you ensure the usage of top-notch technologies and approaches?
- How do you ensure the technical development and growth of your team?
- Provide the latest technical challenge you worked on.
- What is your opinion on tech diversity? Would you impose decisions on the tech stack or would allow for people/teams to decide?
- What is 1 thing you would like to change in your previous company in terms of engineering culture?
It’s important to mention that some companies, especially those who are working on innovative technological products put a lot of emphasis on the technical acumen of their managers. So if you are targeting such companies, it is worth refreshing the knowledge of computer science. I went through these types of interviews:
- system design, where you are given the task to design some well-known system, like PayPal, WhatsApp, etc.
- system design, where you need to talk through the design of a system your team has been working on
- life coding for a concurrent web application
- classical algorithms/data structure coding tasks
What is evaluated in these types of interviews:
- technical comprehension of the systems, dependencies and what that system implied from a team management perspective
- what are you looking for in a good architecture
- your approach to quality and best practices
Some resources to prepare for technical interviews:
- The course about System design interviews with great examples https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-interview
- Tech interview handbook https://techinterviewhandbook.org/