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

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

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

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

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

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

Krishnaveni G. - "Since a bitonic array first increases then decreases, we can: Find the peak using binary search (O(log n)) Reverse the decreasing half Merge the two sorted halvesThis gives an overall time complexity of O(n)."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

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

Kurt K. - "Why skip defining the data model? Or did I just miss it?"See full answer

Sam T. - "demonstrate your ability to recognize and nurture talent, provide growth opportunities, and create an environment that supports and challenges high-performing individuals. Use a real-life example to illustrate your approach and showcase your leadership skills. Managing high performers is an exciting and rewarding aspect of being an engineering manager. These individuals are often the driving force behind innovation, productivity, and success within a team. As a manager, it's crucial to recogni"See full answer

Scott S. - "As a Software Engineering Manager, one of the biggest mistakes I encountered early in my role involved underestimating the importance of aligning team goals with individual career aspirations and professional growth opportunities. This oversight became evident through a project that initially seemed successful but later revealed deeper issues within the team dynamics and morale. I was leading a software development team on a major project aimed at revamping a critical trading platform. The proj"See full answer

Rjj - "I tried solving this question and here is the recorded video for the entire solution - https://youtu.be/G_LIbTp58XA Feel free to comment here or on the video for further discussion."See full answer

Anonymous Capybara - "using a relational database isn't a good choice for this system! we need more availability here than consistency (CAP theorem)"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