/Engineering-Manager-Interview-Kit

Engineering Manager Interview Questions

General

  1. How would you describe your management style?
  2. What size teams have you led?
  3. Have you ever hired before?
  4. Have you ever had to fire anyone? Lay anyone off?
  5. Describe your approach to delegation.
  6. Tell me about a time that delegation didn't work out the way that you expected.
  7. Tell me about a tough decision you've had to make in the last 6 months. Was it the right decision? How do you know? What made it tough?
  8. Tell me about something you are currently learning.
  9. What project in your career are you most proud of and why?

Hiring

  1. Have you ever hired before? How many?
  2. What's an effective way to assess a candidate's communication skills?
  3. Interpersonal skills?
  4. Technical skills?
  5. Collaboration skills?
  6. What are some hiring 'dealbreakers' to you?
  7. Tell me how you would involve your team in the hiring process.
  8. Tell me how you would handle your team disagreeing on a candidate.
  9. What are some hiring 'red flags' to look out for?

Feedback / Performance Assessment / Coaching Engineers

  1. How do you give feedback?
  2. What's a recent piece of difficult feedback you needed to give someone? How did you handle that situation?
  3. How would you handle a low performing team member?
  4. Tell me about a time you turned around a low performing team member's situation.
  5. What makes a good 1:1? How to make sure your 1:1s are effective?
  6. How would you support a person in growing in their technical skills? Communication skills? Leadership skills?
  7. What would you do if a hard-working and well-performing employee began to fail to deliver?
  8. Tell me about a time you needed to give a peer some tough feedback.
  9. Tell me about how you like to onboard new engineers. Does this process differ depending on whether the engineer is junior or senior, and how?

Planning and Leading Technical Projects

  1. How would you coach a team to break down a complicated project?
  2. How do you prefer to structure technical projects? What organizational/planning methods would you use?
  3. When faced with multiple options, none of which seem ideal, how do you make a decision?
  4. Tell me about a time that you had to make a decision without all of the information/with unknowns. How did you make the decision?
  5. Your team needs to make a technical decision and is divided on it. How do you handle this?
  6. Once a technical decision has been made, how do you tell whether it was the correct decision?
  7. Tell me about a recent technical project that you led that did not turn out the way you expected/did not deliver on time. What went wrong? What did you learn and what would you do differently?
  8. When a project is not going as expected, what measures do you take to ensure the best outcome possible?
  9. Tell me about a difficult technical problem you recently encountered and how you resolved it.
  10. Tell me about a time you had to guide a team through a complicated project.
  11. How do you lead a team through a project when requirements are ambiguous? When requirements change frequently?

Collaboration

  1. How can Engineering be a positive partner to Product?
  2. How can Engineering be a positive partner to Design?
  3. How would you collaborate with Product in order to balance Product initiatives with Technical initiatives?

Culture/D&I

  1. How does a manager create positive working culture?
  2. What can a manager do to support an inclusive working culture?
  3. How do you think conflicts on a team should be resolved?
  4. What kind of engineers do you like to hire?
  5. What does diversity mean?
  6. What does equity mean?
  7. What does inclusion mean?
  8. What does it mean to be inclusive?
  9. How do you ensure that you are hiring inclusively?