Google Engineering Manager Interview Questions

Adam M. - "This is a great question! If you don't mind, I'd love to list 3 strengths and weaknesses then dive a little deeper on one of each of them. I think my three greatest strengths are: Empathy Openness to feedback Drive And three weaknesses I have been working to strengthen are: Sometimes my desire to achieve can put me at risk of overcommitting Communicating status to the right stakeholders at the appropriate time Creating detailed and strategic lists of priorities so I can meet th"See full answer

Kshitij A. - "The question is bit vague (I guess deliberately) so I believe firstly we shall ask questions and resolve ambiguity. Some initial questions could be : 1) Is this one time activity or something that should be done on continuous basis. If continuous basis then at what frequency. 2) How much staleness is acceptable in SYSTEM Y data 3) Are there any limitation in SYSTEM Y and is it fair to assume that we would need some kind of transformation to bring data into SYSTEM Y schema. 4) What kind of vol"See full answer

Chetan R. - "Is this in-memory key value store or Disk based as store they are trying to make? Can someone help me with this"See full answer

Srini K. - "performance issues and sudden spikes on input requests by scaling techniques and optimization."See full answer

Ben G. - "Situation - A time where I had to collaborate with a team member in another department was while I was at Google working on my hotel project and had to work with the legal department for our OOBE flow. Task - I was tasked to work cross functionally with the legal department to lead the design of the out of box experience for our product to ensure our guest users were sure of policies around data and privacy. Action - In order to establish cadence and effective relationship building, I set up a t"See full answer

Scott S. - " Project Overview: Real-Time Risk Management System Objective The goal was to develop a real-time risk management system capable of processing and analyzing large volumes of trading data to provide near-instantaneous risk assessments. This system was crucial for enabling traders to make informed decisions while managing their exposure to various market risks in real-time. Complexity Factors 1. \\Data Volume and Velocity\\ \\High Throughput:\\ The system needed to ha"See full answer

Santhosh K. - "As an engineering manager, motivation is key to the success of the team. Here are some ways to motivate the team: Set clear goals: Clearly defined goals help team members understand what they're working towards and give them a sense of purpose. Offer growth opportunities: Providing opportunities for professional development and advancement can increase motivation and job satisfaction. Provide recognition and rewards: Recognising and rewarding team members for their hard work and achieve"See full answer

Vaishnavi T. - "During my time as a Product Manager, we were preparing for a major product release with a tight deadline and discovered that implementing both a new feature and crucial performance improvements wasn't feasible within the timeframe. So, I organized a meeting with stakeholders to assess the impact of each option. We analyzed user data, projected ROI, and considered long-term product strategy. Ultimately, I decided to prioritize the performance improvements. As a result, the product launched on tim"See full answer

Scott S. - "The Situation About a year ago, we faced a period of high turnover and low morale within the data engineering team. This was particularly challenging as we were in the middle of a critical project to enhance our real-time market data analytics platform. Retaining and motivating the team was crucial to ensure the project’s success and maintain the operational efficiency of our trading systems. Initial Steps Recognizing the urgency, I initiated a comprehensive approach to address the underlying"See full answer

onering2ruleall - "My leadership style is flexible and adaptive, it varies depending on the team members and the needs of the company. My leadership goal is to empower the team and inspire and grow leaders. In order to achieve that, I combine transformational, democratic and coaching leadership styles. Usually when we are facing a new type of challenge, or at the early stage of a project, I like to adapt the transformational leadership which allows me to listen to all the suggestions from the team members and sta"See full answer

Nid P. - "I explained the story of trying to help the engineer to improve the performance and after it is failed, the steps I have taken to move the eng to PIP."See full answer

Graig - "Yes to peer manager from stackholder team the problem was every time she wanted say something she used to have three way connect with me and my manager"See full answer

Chantal C. - "Understand gaps team by interviewing on 1:1, reading past performance reviews and talking to old managers/cross functional Identify Goals and use the SMART framework to set those goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, relevant, time related) Share with team and make sure they understand them. Clarify questions if needed. Explain WHY these goals matter. Tie to company goals/mission/culture. Put together an action plan TOGETHER- give often feedback: "pinches no punches"See full answer

Gk K. - " can we use blomfilters to check existing usernames? and if both are creating at a time, like both are choosing some abcd , here system checks whether user with that name exists or not. so while checking , it will add an entry on redis (example) with this name as key and obtain lock using some distributed lock. , it will lock on that name. (like seat booking in bookmyshow) with some TTL value. so this check will happen once user enters his interest username and also while submit .. 2 times che"See full answer

Sourabh G. - "Functional Requirement Monitor health, metrics Alert in case of failure/anomaly Visualize the live health Analyse machines on periodic basis Non Functional Should not exert load on machines low latency Highly scalable Logs/Metrics Gathering push - machine gather and send to system and low priority background thread along with batching pull - heart beat check (for offline machines) Processing Real time streaming using Kafka/kinesis + Flink TimeSeries database for stor"See full answer

shg - "(This was not search autocomplete based on prefix matching question.) First of all, please note :- The interviewer is not expecting you to get to the right answer in just 1 hr. These systems have been designed over months and improved over years and its impractical for anyone to expect you to get to the right answer in 1 hr. (There is no one single right answer). At the end, the interviewer (director level person) told me the same. What they are looking for is your thought process, getting from"See full answer

Musonda C. - "Imagine you have a friend from France that speaks French, and you only speak English. You and your friend want to play a talking game. So, for your friend to understand you and for you to understand what your friend is saying you would need an API between the two of you. The api has its own language called api language. You and your friend will both get a small book that tells you how to speak api language. The api in between you and your friend would allow both of you to speak API language to"See full answer