Engineering Manager Interview Questions

Nicholas S. - "First thing the interviewee did wrong is not asking clarifying questions. This is the most vague problem I have every heard, and the interviewee just made assumptions and started programming."See full answer

Imju B. - "Wondering what is the difference between OKR based and Roadmap based. I feel it is based on the time horizon."See full answer

Amparo L. - "Some coworkers say to me that I'm a hard worker, but some say that I can be a little loud while I'm working, So then when I get that feedback I would say I'm sorry that you felt that way and I will promise I will work on it."See full answer

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

Dheeraj D. - "Thanks Hozefa for your insights on this. I see that hozefa talks about giving used cases. It would be very helpful if there was an example provided with STAR framework."See full answer

Faraz A. - "Scoped out problem constraints - how much data to download, how many computers, and how much time, how you can be detected (decentralized load). Designed a web crawler."See full answer

James W. - "I've recently worked closely with a product that had both the best and worst performing teams. The situation is that one team is struggling to deliver within a reasonable timeframe, a few stronger members of the team are carrying the weaker. Work is taking a long time. They aren't listening to each other. They aren't helping each other to get work over the line. They are getting stuck down rabbit holes. They aren't continually improving their processes. They are getting frustrated and at risk o"See full answer

V V. - "Simple file system ( Hash Map , LSM trees), and consistent hashing. I failed to discuss about conflicts ( Versioning)"See full answer

gdecuri - "Load Balancer, Multiple API Servers, game Service, pub-sub system, HTTP Long Polling for status updates, write-through cache. No SQL DB to store user, game, and move information."See full answer

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

Arshia I. - "General response: Apple’s approach to delivering seamless, personalized experiences through data, while upholding a strong ethical commitment to privacy, resonates with my own values. I want to contribute to projects that optimize user engagement and create meaningful interactions on a large scale, and I believe Apple is the ideal place to make that impact. Tailored to the team: Talk about the product, its impact internally, and the customer."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

Scott S. - " The Situation A few months ago, our trading platform started experiencing significant latency issues during peak trading hours. This latency was affecting our ability to process real-time market data and execute trades efficiently, potentially leading to substantial financial losses and missed opportunities. Identifying the Problem The first step was to identify the root cause of the latency. I organized a team meeting with our data engineers, DevOps, and network specialists to gather"See full answer

Ilnur I. - "I really appreciate how he clearly explains every term he uses!"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

Anonymous Krill - "I wish there were more real-life examples, more practical information that actually demonstrates the wealth of experience. In the beginning, we are introduced to 3 pillars: trust, high productivity, and growth mindset. It would have been nice to see 1 example for each of these pillars in practice. the interview response was very theoretical and diplomatic. Very shy in providing even small real-life examples e.g. question what are the example guidelines teams would set by themselves to identify w"See full answer

Clayton P. - "The interviewer hinted that a two-tower recommender system might be a suitable approach, using user history to embed users and pages separately and train on view or interaction data. Instead, I proposed a different approach that I felt was more aligned with how knowledge is structured in Confluence: I designed a system using a graph database to model the relationships between Confluence pages. Each page is a node, and edges represent content-based references. For example, when one article"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