Engineering Manager Interview Questions

Vikas T. - "This is coming from an Amazon manager who are taught to PIP people out. The first part he said is completely opposite with Amazon. They just pull people randomly into the room and put them either on dev list or PIP. This is unfortunately true for all of Amazon."See full answer

anush - "@Jacob, your videos are really good and helpful. I want to know about the tool, you use for explaining the design in the videos."See full answer

A B. - "Great explanation on each of the components and their use. During the interview would a PM candidate be expected to go in-depth for capacity estimation (e.g. storage estimation, bandwidth estimation etc.?)"See full answer

Anjali V. - "I feel this is more about "Describe a time when I failed or struggled" rather than "Project Failure"."See full answer

Anshika R. - "Functional Requirement User should be able to add review the food item/order User should be able to rate the food item delivered User should be able to Like/Dislike others reviews User should be able to see all reviews on a food item Users should be able to receive rewards based on criteria- (Quality of the reviews- Based on number of likes - Monthly cash card) OOS - Item is already ordered and exists in a separate system, User is authenticated. No Media Non Functional requireme"See full answer

Scott S. - "Designing a Price Drop Tracker system like CamelCamelCamel involves creating a platform that tracks price changes for products on various e-commerce websites and notifies users when prices drop. Here’s a detailed system design for such a service: Functional Requirements User Registration and Authentication\: Users can register and log in. Support for social media logins (e.g., Google, Facebook). Product Tracking\: Users can add products to their watchlist for"See full answer

dreamingincode - "In the API design, the interviewer is switching between RPC style (operation based endpoints) and REST style (resource oriented). Sticking to one convention and explaining why it is preferred over the other e.g. REST if the twitter domain maps nicely to resources e.g. /tweet or /follower or /user would help to create a more consistent and unified API. It would make it easier for clients to integrate with the API as well."See full answer

Chitapuram N. - "Since there is a need for the data to be accurate and consistent without any latency to allocate a spot, can't the data be synchronously synced to replicas after every write as the number of writes are not many per min, instead of read lock phenomena Let me know if i am on a wrong thought here."See full answer

Mrinalini R. - "A good answer is describing an experience where you either proposed something that was selected after discussion or an alternate approach was taken, or you disagreed with a decision and argued for something else, either successfully or not. A good answer would be you had cogent arguments, the decision went another way for some reason, and you then fully backed the decision (agree to disagree is another way of stating it). You did not take it personally and you fully committed to the deci"See full answer

Usman B. - "System Components Data Collection Layer Posts with hashtags are asynchronously sent to Kafka topics Each message contains: hashtag, timestamp, userid, postid Multiple Kafka partitions ensure scalability and fault tolerance Processing Layer Apache Flink processes streams in real-time Implements sliding window aggregation (1hr, 24hr, 7d windows) Calculates topic popularity using weighted metrics: Post count User engagement (likes, comments) Unique user"See full answer

Robert H. - "The addition of an intermediate "sanitization" ML is something Neeraj used in the Uber Eats design and again seems kind of outside the scope here and redundant. This can simply be built into the AI response model to save a step. It's not clear what benefit this step provides, and he basically said we should have it "just because it would be good" and there's no concrete reasoning why to include it. Adding a Kafka queue to handle the thumbs-down ratings? For what purpose do you need a queue othe"See full answer

S R. - "Wrote up a simple cache system using python dict. Added TTL requirement. Then went into code-level concurrency issues for the cache."See full answer

Adib M. - "Notes from the Video. 1-1s are two way feedback. Important tool to discuss things that are not possible in group setting feedback to employee by manager feedback to manager by employee Feedback to employee can vary by the type of performer the employee is (a) high performer (b) meets expectations (c) under performing Dos and Don't Avoid project discussion as they can be obtained else where. Focus on feedback to employee. Unless there is a critical project item to be d"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

Rajesh V. - "As a PM i received a feedback from my program manager on my style of verbal communication. It is about me speaking faster when i wanted to get away with a topic that i wasn't confident (may be not backed up with data, or still in process of getting detailed insight of a problem etc.). Whereas when I'm confident I tend to speak slowly or more assertively that made people to follow easily. I welcomed that feedback so from then on when I'm not confident in a topic I became more assertive to let pe"See full answer

Ashish G. - "Rate Limiter is to limit the number of request from a particular IP Address. Rate limiter will block the IP address to reduce the load on server. It should be highly available and handle concurrent requests. Blocked IP addresses should be kept in a pool which is present in shared cache. We need to keep threshold value after it reaches threshold value it should start blocking IP address. All these ip address to be kept in No SQL DB. Batch will run that will clear the cache and delete all the bloc"See full answer

Ben G. - "Situation - A time I dealt with conflict while on a team was while I was working at Shopify on physical and digital gift card refund point of sale solutions. The situation was that we were dealing with complex technical constraints including not changing particular UI components behavior to act as they should be intended. On the refund screen, the existing design was using a toggle on the same screen to bring up a modal for gift card selection to either select digital or physical options. Thi"See full answer

Ross B. - "I most want to communicate a few principals of conflict resolution that I believe were integral in this situation, which are mutual respect, a results orientation, an unwavering focus on the user. To that end, here’s how I’d like to structure this answer: First, I’ll tell you about the project we were working on, to provide some background for you. Second, I’ll describe the disagreement. Third, I’ll describe how we arrived at a solution, and finally, I’ll discuss how those 3 conflict resolu"See full answer