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Engineering Manager Questions

Wendy-Lynn

Outside of Google and Facebook, you can encounter more typical behavioral questions from engineering leads. These types of questions are typically needed for interviews in Start-ups or Amazon when interviewed by Engineering manager. 

Engineering Manager Questions (Non-Technical):

  1. Tell me about a time when you defended the engineering team, when customers or executives were being unreasonable in their demands.

  2. How do you typically keep engineers in the loop about company initiatives and priorities?

  3. How do you typically keep engineers in the loop about customer needs and customer context?

  4. Tell me about a time when you had to juggle multiple high-priority initiatives. How did you approach the situation?

  5. Tell me about a time when you were able to keep the engineering team staffed with shovel-ready work while you drove a highly uncertain discovery project.

  6. How do you usually like to plan out work?

  7. How do you deal with sudden shifts in priorities?

  8. How do you deal with sudden fires?

  9. Let’s say that we estimated that a critical initiative will take 2 months to complete, and our leadership team decides to fund the initiative. But, now that we’re tackling the work, we discover that it will actually take 5 months to complete. How do you react?

  10. As a product manager, how do you typically onboard new engineers to the team?

  11. How do you typically structure your product specs? Why do you structure them that way?

  12. How do you typically structure tasks for the team? Why do you structure them that way?

  13. How do you typically approach the roadmapping process? Who do you involve, at which stages of the process?

  14. Say that you prioritize working on a feature that is owned by a different team within the company. How do you set our team up for success?

  15. Say that a different team within the company decides that they need to work on a feature that our team owns. How do you approach the situation?

Engineering Manager Questions (Technical):

  1. Explain how a recommender works to me.

  2. How will you design a recommender architecture?

 

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