Engineering Manager (M1/M2) Interview Experience

Can you walk me through your engineering manager experience, what you have managed, and your leadership style?

I walked through my EM experience, the kinds of teams and projects I had led, and how I manage people and delivery. It was less about polished stories and more about whether my background fit what they needed right now. I could feel him mapping my answers to a team that would start small and need to grow.

Because they were forming a new team in Seattle, I answered this very practically. I said I would prioritize the highest-value work, work closely with the sister teams that already know the space, and set the team up so it can operate with a small number of engineers first and then scale in a controlled way.

I gave my reasons for wanting Apple specifically, not just another big tech company. In this round they clearly cared whether I actually wanted Apple and this team, not whether I was just interviewing everywhere.

Do you have experience handling this kind of scale, with Apple-sized traffic and huge amounts of metrics data?

I said yes, I had handled similar large-scale traffic and data problems at another big tech company. It was not a super technical deep dive, but he wanted to know whether I had really worked at the scale they operate at, because this team supports massive observability workloads.

He told me this was a real problem, which made the discussion much more practical. I proposed a phased migration with backfilling, keeping both stores alive for a period, and adding an abstraction layer at the application side so reads could go to the old or new storage without breaking compatibility. My focus was no data loss and no interruption to live traffic.

They gave me some detail on the old open source storage and its partitioning and scale problems, then asked how I would design the replacement. I used consistent hashing so that when we add one or more hosts, only a limited amount of existing data needs to move. That was the core of how I answered the partitioning and scaling part.

How would you manage your team while working with very senior engineers and other stakeholders on a problem like this?

He also shifted into how I would lead in that environment, especially because he came across like a very tenured senior engineer. I talked about setting clear engineering direction, working well with senior ICs instead of fighting for control, and aligning with other teams early because this kind of migration is not owned by one group in isolation.

The task was not to solve Sudoku, just validate that a completed board was correct and return false on duplicates. I was able to solve it, partly because they let me use a real coding tool instead of a whiteboard. Afterward he asked how I would optimize it, and I admitted I had duplicated some logic and would refactor that into helper functions rather than rewriting everything on the spot.

I treated it like a low-level storage design problem rather than a broad architecture interview. I talked through the storage layout, indexing approach, and the API surface I would provide. After the interview I felt I probably missed some important lower-level details, like more specific indexing choices, because I did not have a lot of context in that kind of internal large-data storage design.

If we also need to support Europe, how would you keep the data consistent while still giving users low latency?

This was the hardest part for me. I first answered with auto-sync between regions so users could read with low latency while data stayed consistent, but they pushed on the size of the data and the actual sync mechanics. In hindsight I should have talked about chunking the large objects so replication could happen in parallel, because I did not get all the way there during the interview.

They asked it broadly, so I clarified whether they meant conflict inside my team or at a larger org level. They were more interested in a bigger problem, so I answered with a cross-team conflict I had been involved in rather than a small interpersonal issue between two engineers.

I answered with a couple of real cases where I had coached engineers who were underperforming. I talked about being direct on the gap, keeping the person motivated by making the expectations concrete, and building a forward coaching plan with clear checkpoints instead of making it feel vague or purely punitive.

I focused on project management and stakeholder communication. I said I would surface the risk early, re-evaluate scope and sequencing, and communicate clearly with stakeholders instead of waiting until the deadline is already missed. That part felt like a common EM question, but they still wanted a practical answer.