Interviewing for software engineering management roles can be daunting. You need to demonstrate technical knowledge, management skills, strategic thinking, and leadership abilities all in a short interview. Preparing yourself to answer the most common engineering manager interview questions is crucial to show how you can lead teams to success.

In this tutorial, we'll go through the top engineering manager interview questions you're likely to encounter for both behavioral and technical interviews. We'll look at sample answers that highlight your strengths as an engineering leader across key areas like influencing others, removing roadblocks, and setting technical vision. With the right preparation, you can confidently take on engineering manager interviews and land the perfect leadership role for you. Let's get started!

Behavioral Interview Questions

Behavioral interview questions ask you to recall specific situations and how you responded. They reveal your people skills, critical thinking, and values. Some common behavioral engineering manager interview questions include:

• Tell me about a time you influenced a team without formal authority. What tactics did you use and what was the outcome?
• How would you go about building relationships with engineers you manage?
• Describe a situation where you had to resolve a disagreement between team members. How did you approach it?
• Tell me about a time you mentored or coached an engineer to improve their skills. What improvements did you see?
• Give an example of when you had to deliver difficult feedback to an engineer. How did you handle it?
• What is your approach to managing underperforming engineers?

Prepare 2-3 examples from your experience for each of these areas. Focus your answers on the actions you took, your rationale, and the results. This shows the concrete steps you would take as an engineering manager to lead, develop, and support your engineers.

Tell me about a time you influenced a team without formal authority. What tactics did you use and what was the outcome?

What the interviewer is looking for:

The interviewer wants to know if you can influence and motivate others without relying on formal authority. They want to see that you can persuade team members, build consensus, and guide outcomes even as an individual contributor.

Example response:

When I was a software engineer at Acme Co, I wanted to improve our team's code testing practices. I knew adding more automated tests would reduce bugs and technical debt. However, I had no management authority to mandate or assign testing tasks at the time. To build support, I first recruited two other engineers who were excited about testing. Together, we built a prototype in our free time showing how automated UI tests could catch bugs early. We then demoed the prototype in our weekly team meeting and highlighted how it could improve product quality. This sparked a lively discussion and helped the team recognize the benefits of more automated testing.

I also worked one-onone with engineers, explaining how tests would make their features more robust and save them debugging time later. As momentum built, I volunteered to author our team's automated testing guidelines. Within two months of starting this effort, we had gotten buy-in from our whole 12-person team to adopt automated testing best practices and rotate testing duties. This drove a significant quality improvement for our product."

Describe a situation where you had to resolve a disagreement between team members. How did you approach it?

What the interviewer is looking for:

The interviewer wants to understand your conflict resolution skills. They want to hear how you would dig into the disagreement, facilitate a discussion, and guide the engineers to find a resolution. They are looking for a collaborative, team-focused approach.

Example response:

When I was leading a team of 5 engineers, two of them had an ongoing disagreement about the best way to structure part of our backend architecture. One wanted to take a microservices approach while the other preferred a monolithic architecture. This disagreement had been going on for weeks and was creating tension on the team.

To resolve it, I first met one-on-one with each engineer to understand their perspectives. This helped me identify the core pros and cons of each approach from their point of views. I then brought them together and facilitated a discussion focused on the objective tradeoffs, like ease of scaling versus development speed.

I made sure each engineer felt heard, then offered my own perspective on which approach may work better based on our near-term roadmap and technical constraints. By the end, we arrived at a hybrid model that everyone could get behind. Keeping the discussion focused on the facts rather than opinions was key. This situation improved team cohesion and taught everyone that architectural debates are fine as long as they remain constructive.

Tell me about a time you mentored or coached an engineer to improve their skills. What improvements did you see?

What the interviewer is looking for: The interviewer wants to know that you can develop engineering talent. They want to hear how you identify growth areas, provide effective guidance, and drive tangible improvements.

Example response:

"When I joined Acme Co, I inherited an engineer who was struggling with our core app architecture. I noticed he had difficulty designing new features that aligned to our patterns and principles. To help him improve, I scheduled regular 1:1s to review designs together before he started coding. When I saw issues, I would walk through alternatives instead of just pointing them out.

After a few sessions, his proposals improved dramatically. I also suggested online courses and PR reviews with other engineers to expose him to more examples. Over 2-3 months, he made huge progress. Where he required heavy oversight initially, he soon was able to handle complex features independently. His teammates also noticed his growth in our technical design reviews."

Give an example of when you had to deliver difficult feedback to an engineer. How did you handle it?

What the interviewer is looking for:

The interviewer wants to ensure you can provide constructive feedback directly and respectfully even when it is less-than-positive. They want to hear how you approached the situation with empathy and care for the engineer.

Example response:

One of the engineers I managed at Acme Co was struggling with follow-through. He would volunteer for tasks but then not complete them on time. I knew I needed to address this directly but also empathetically. I scheduled a 1:1 focused specifically on giving him feedback. I started by praising his enthusiasm and good ideas, then gave him my direct feedback that incomplete tasks were causing issues. I made it clear I wanted to support him in improving here. We had an open discussion about potential reasons and challenges. He offered that he was taking on too much.

Together, we decided he would focus on fewer priorities and I would check in more frequently. Over the next month, his follow-through and reliability significantly improved. Starting with empathy rather than just criticism and making it a two-way discussion was key.

Leadership Interview Questions

In addition to screening for people management skills, engineering manager interviews will assess your leadership abilities with behavioral questions like:

• Tell me about a time you motivated your team during a challenging situation.

• Describe a project or initiative you drove from start to finish. What were the results?

• Give an example of when you took a leadership role outside of work. What was your impact?

• How would you go about building alignment around a new technology or process your team is resistant to adopt?

• What is your approach to developing the leadership skills of engineers on your team?

For these leadership questions, focus on examples that convey strategic vision, ability to motivate others, project management skills, perseverance, and growth mindset. Illustrate how you would connect the dots for your team between day-to-day work and larger business goals. Share examples that show you leading both in and outside of work.

How would you handle a situation where a top-performing engineer on your team consistently misses team meetings or deadlines, but their individual output is exceptional?

What the Interviewer is Looking For:

1. Leadership Skills: The ability to address issues head-on, demonstrate empathy, and navigate challenging personnel situations.
2. Team Dynamics Understanding: Recognizing the importance of team cohesion and the potential negative impact one individual can have on team morale, regardless of their individual output.
3. Conflict Resolution: The aptitude to address conflict in a constructive manner, seeking understanding, and aiming for a resolution that benefits both the individual and the team.
4. Balancing Individual vs. Team Needs: Weighing the value of a top performer against the overall health and productivity of the team.

Example Response:

"In my experience, the cohesion and overall health of the team are paramount, even when dealing with high-performing individuals. First, I'd have a private one-on-one conversation with the engineer to understand the root cause of their behavior. It's essential to approach this from a position of empathy and genuine concern, rather than reprimand. There could be personal issues or other valid reasons for their behavior that we're not aware of.

If it's a matter of them not seeing the value in the meetings or the set deadlines, I'd work with them to understand their perspective while also communicating the importance of these aspects for the team's overall dynamics and productivity. It's possible they might not be aware of the broader implications of their actions on the team's morale and performance.

However, if the behavior continues, it might be necessary to implement more concrete steps. This could range from adjusting their responsibilities, providing them with additional mentorship, or, in extreme cases, re-evaluating if they are a good fit for the team's culture and dynamics. An individual's exceptional output is valuable, but the overall health and productivity of the team are paramount."

Tell me about a time you motivated your team during a challenging situation.

When COVID first hit, we had to rapidly transition our in-person tech team to fully remote work. Morale was low on my team of 10 engineers. It was a stressful time in their personal lives and connecting with teammates suddenly became difficult.

I knew I needed to actively motivate them through this transition. First, I started scheduling virtual coffee chats to just talk about anything besides work. This personal facetime helped strengthen our relationships. I also sent encouraging text messages when engineers achieved milestones.

Most importantly, I emphasized that the work we were doing was making an even bigger difference given the pandemic. I shared stories of how our products were helping customers. By the next month, team morale bounced back up and we actually achieved a major release ahead of schedule. Connecting work to meaning was key to motivating the team through uncertainty.

How would you go about evaluating technology options for a new product or feature?

What the interviewer is looking for:

The interviewer wants to understand your process for making technology decisions, including factors you consider and how you evaluate tradeoffs. They want to hear about gathering requirements, comparing options, prototyping, and making data-driven technology choices.

Example response:

"Whenever I need to evaluate technology options, I start by clearly identifying the business and user requirements. This helps me determine the technical capabilities needed and narrow down the right solutions to consider.

For example, when our team needed to build video streaming into our app, I met with product and design leads to understand performance, mobile experience, and backend integration requirements.

With requirements defined, I researched relevant technology options like WebRTC, HLS, and proprietary SDKs. I compared their technical tradeoffs in areas like real-time performance, browser support, scalability needs, and ease of implementation.

I prototyped the top 2-3 options in parallel, had my team test each, and gathered feedback. This data helped me determine that WebRTC was the best fit. Through requirements gathering, research, and prototyping, I aim to set my team up for success by picking the right technologies."

What is your approach to developing the leadership skills of engineers on your team?

What the interviewer is looking for:

The interviewer wants to understand how you mentor and develop leadership abilities in your team members. They are looking for answers that demonstrate coaching skills and a commitment to advancing your team.

Example response:

"I believe one of the most important aspects of people management is nurturing leadership skills within your team. For engineers with leadership potential, I first have candid discussions about their goals and offer them stretch opportunities like leading small projects.

As they take on leadership roles, I coach them 1:1 on influencing skills, conflict resolution, strategic thinking, and other core competencies. We debrief after key meetings and interactions so I can provide feedback.

I also encourage participation in our company’s emerging leaders program which provides excellent skill building through classes and cohort-based learning.

Finally, I celebrate wins and progression among aspiring engineering leaders on my team. Supporting and guiding those with leadership ability ultimately helps strengthen my team’s performance and culture."

Technical Leadership Questions

• How would you go about evaluating technology options for a new product or feature?

• Tell me about a time you influenced your team to adopt a new technology. How did you get buy-in?

• Describe a situation where you had to push back against technical debt or shortcuts. How did you make the case?

• Explain how you stay on top of new technologies and industry trends. How do you evaluate which are worth investing in?

For these questions, interviewers want to understand your technical decision making process and ability to align technology choices with business goals. Share examples that demonstrate stakeholder influence, strategic thinking, and ability to balance short term needs with long term innovation.

Describe a time when you had to make a difficult leadership decision that was unpopular with your team. How did you handle it, and what did you learn from the experience?

What the Interviewer is Looking For:

1. Decision-Making Abilities: The capacity to make tough choices when necessary, even if they might not be well-received.
2. Communication Skills: The ability to convey the rationale behind decisions effectively and address concerns.
3. Empathy and Emotional Intelligence: Recognizing and valuing team members' emotions and feedback, even when decisions can't be altered.
4. Reflection and Growth: Demonstrating the ability to learn from past experiences and continuously strive to be a better leader.

Example Response:

"At my previous role as an Engineering Manager at XYZ Corp, we were working on a crucial project with a tight deadline. Midway through, it became clear that the technology stack we were using was not scalable enough to meet the project's long-term requirements. After evaluating our options, I made the decision to switch to a different technology stack, even though it meant some of our previous work would be rendered obsolete.

Unsurprisingly, the decision was met with resistance and frustration from the team. They were concerned about the time already invested and the steep learning curve associated with the new stack.

I called a team meeting to discuss the decision openly. I explained the rationale behind the switch, emphasizing the long-term benefits and the potential pitfalls of continuing with our current stack. While I acknowledged the hard work they had put in, I also highlighted that our ultimate responsibility was to deliver the best possible product for our users and the company.

I also arranged for intensive training sessions to ease the transition to the new technology. Over time, as the team grew more comfortable with the new stack and began to see its benefits, the initial resistance faded.

From this experience, I learned the importance of transparent communication and being open to feedback. Making unpopular decisions is sometimes part of leadership, but how we communicate and support our team through those decisions makes all the difference. It reinforced my belief that, as a leader, it's crucial to always keep the bigger picture in mind, even when faced with short-term challenges."

Describe a situation where you had to push back against technical debt or shortcuts. How did you make the case?

What the interviewer is looking for:

The interviewer wants to understand how you balance delivering features quickly with maintaining high quality and sustainable code. They want to hear how you justify prioritizing code health even when it slows things down in the short-term.

Example response:

"As the lead engineer on my team, I inherited a codebase with years of messy, untested code written by different engineers. My product manager kept pushing me to deliver new features out quickly. However, I knew we needed to prioritize technical debt first or velocity would eventually grind to a halt.

To make my case, I put together a presentation for my PM with code profiling data. I demonstrated how our technical debt was directly slowing down our feature development due to fragility and bugs. I proposed that we spend one sprint focused just on refactoring, implementing test coverage, and documenting key flows.

While hesitant at first, my PM agreed to a trial refactoring sprint. After we delivered a more robust codebase, my team's feature velocity increased 30% while bugs decreased. I successfully advocated for making refactoring sprints a regular practice going forward. Having hard data to correlate debt to velocity was the key to getting buy-in."

Tell me about a time you influenced your team to adopt a new technology. How did you get buy-in?

When I joined Acme Co, our web application used jQuery and vanilla JavaScript. I wanted to introduce React to improve developer productivity and application performance. However, my team of 15 developers was comfortable staying with jQuery.

To gain buy-in, I researched the benefits of React and put together a presentation tailored for my more junior developers. I focused on how React would speed development and reduce bugs - things they cared about.

I also identified two engineers who were eager early adopters and asked them to build a prototype page in React. When they showed how much faster features could be built, it helped convince the skeptics.

Over the next quarter, I slowly ramped our team up on React through demos, documentation, and pairing new React code with jQuery. Within 6 months, we had completely migrated our application and improved our feature throughput by 20%. Focusing the case for React on tangible benefits for our specific team was key to driving adoption.

Imagine you're leading a team responsible for migrating a monolithic application to a microservices architecture. What would be your strategy, and how would you address potential challenges that might arise during the migration?

What the Interviewer is Looking For:

1. Technical Depth: An understanding of both monolithic and microservices architectures, and the complexities of migrating between them.
2. Strategic Thinking: Ability to plan the migration in phases, prioritizing components, and ensuring minimal disruption.
3. Risk Mitigation: Recognizing potential pitfalls and having strategies to address them.
4. Team Management: Ensuring that the team is equipped with the right knowledge and tools to carry out the migration.
5. Stakeholder Communication: Managing expectations and keeping relevant stakeholders informed throughout the process.

Example Response:

"Migrating from a monolithic architecture to microservices is a substantial undertaking and requires a well-thought-out strategy. Here's how I would approach it:

1. Assessment & Planning: Before diving in, I'd initiate a thorough assessment of the current monolithic application. Understanding its components, dependencies, and data flow is crucial. This would help in deciding which services to prioritize during the migration and identifying potential challenges.

2. Start Small: Instead of a complete overhaul right away, I'd advocate for starting with one or two non-critical components. This allows the team to familiarize themselves with the process, tools, and potential issues in a relatively low-risk environment.

3. Build the Infrastructure: Microservices require a robust infrastructure, including container orchestration (like Kubernetes), continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and monitoring tools. Setting up this foundation early ensures a smoother migration process.

4. Training & Upskilling: It's essential to ensure that the team has the required skills. This might involve training sessions, workshops, or even hiring specialists if needed.

5. Data Management: One of the trickiest parts of such migrations is managing data, especially if we're breaking up a monolithic database. I'd prioritize creating a strategy for data migration, ensuring consistency, and handling schema changes.

6. Monitoring & Feedback Loop: Once services start migrating, continuous monitoring is crucial. It helps in catching issues early and adjusting the strategy based on real-world feedback.

7. Stakeholder Communication: I'd maintain regular communication with stakeholders, updating them on progress, challenges, and adjustments to timelines or scope. This ensures alignment and manages expectations.

8. Addressing Challenges: Potential challenges could include data inconsistencies, increased network latency, or service interdependencies. Having a dedicated team to troubleshoot issues, perform testing, and ensure quality is crucial.

In conclusion, while the migration from monolithic to microservices is technically challenging, with a methodical approach, clear communication, and a focus on continuous learning and improvement, it can lead to a more scalable, maintainable, and resilient system."

One Pager Cheat Sheet

• The article is a tutorial on how to prepare for software engineering management roles interviews, covering both behavioral and technical aspects, with sample responses to common questions aimed at demonstrating technical aptitude, strategic thinking, and leadership abilities to ensure successful interviews.
• Behavioral interview questions probe your past experiences to assess your interpersonal skills, problem-solving abilities, and values; common questions for an engineering manager interview involve handling team dynamics, building relationships, mentoring, and managing performance, with optimal answers focusing on specific actions, rationale, and results.
• The interviewer is seeking to understand if the candidate can influence and motivate others without formal authority, verifying their skills in persuasion, consensus building, and guiding outcomes as an individual contributor. An example response is from a software engineer at Acme Co., who, despite not being a manager, managed to get his 12-person team to adopt automated testing best practices by initially working with excited colleagues, demonstrating the advantages, explaining it would result in robust features and save on debugging time, and finally volunteering to write the automated testing guidelines resulting in a significant product quality improvement.
• The interviewer is seeking insight into the candidate's conflict resolution skills, looking for a collaborative approach. The example response recounts a disagreement over backend architecture between two team engineers which was resolved by facilitating a fact-based discussion guided by near-term roadmap and technical constraints, ultimately leading to a hybrid model everyone supported, thereby boosting team cohesion.
• The respondent mentored an engineer at Acme Co who was having trouble with the company's core app architecture, using regular 1:1 design review sessions, online courses, and PR reviews to help him improve over a period of 2-3 months, resulting in the engineer being able to handle complex features independently and his growth being recognized in technical design reviews.
• The interviewee successfully delivered difficult feedback to an engineer who was not completing tasks on time by approaching the situation with empathy and respect, praising his enthusiastic attitude while addressing the issue, and creating a mutually agreed-upon solution to improve his follow-through and reliability.
• Engineering manager interviews focus on assessing applicants' leadership abilities through behavioral questions, which require them to demonstrate their strategic vision, ability to motivate others, project management skills, perseverance, and growth mindset via real-world examples in people management and project implementations.
• The interviewer wants to evaluate the candidate's leadership skills, understanding of team dynamics, their abilities in conflict resolution and in balancing individual vs. team needs when dealing with a scenario where an exceptionally performing engineer consistently misses team meetings or deadlines; the candidate would initially approach the engineer with empathy and try to identify the cause, then explain how their actions impact team morale and productivity, finally taking more decisive steps if the behavior persists, as team health and productivity are paramount.
• The team leader motivated their team of engineers during the challenging transition to remote work due to COVID, by organizing virtual coffee chats, sending encouraging messages, and linking their work to the meaningful impact on customers, ultimately leading to a boost in morale and a major product release ahead of schedule.
• The interviewee evaluates technology options for a new product or feature by first identifying business and user requirements, researching the relevant technologies, comparing their technical tradeoffs, prototyping the most promising ones, and then making data-driven decisions based on this process.
• The respondent believes in nurturing leadership skills in their team by having candid discussions about goals, providing stretch opportunities, offering 1:1 coaching, encouraging participation in the company's emerging leaders program, and celebrating wins and progression for engineers showing leadership potential.
• The text discusses technical leadership questions often asked in interviews, such as how to evaluate technology options for a new product, examples of influencing team adoption of new technology, dealing with technical debt or shortcuts, and staying updated on new technologies and industry trends, all aiming to understand the interviewee's technical decision-making process and ability to align technology with business goals.
• The interviewer seeks to assess Decision-Making Abilities, Communication Skills, Empathy, Emotional Intelligence, Reflection and Growth in a leader who made an unpopular decision to switch technology stack in a crucial project at XYZ Corp due to scalability issues. The leader emphasized transparent communication and feedback, arranged for training to ease transition, and learned about the paramount importance of supporting teams amidst unpopular decisions focusing on the bigger picture.
• The interviewer is looking for examples of how you've balanced swift feature delivery with code health, how you've confronted technical debt, and made a case for prioritizing it using code profiling data that shows its impact on feature development velocity. One potential response could involve detailing an instance where, as a lead engineer, you successfully advocated for a refactoring sprint to address technical debt, which resulted in increased feature velocity and decreased bugs.
• By researching and presenting the benefits of React for developer productivity and application performance, and enlisting early adopters to prototype a page in React, the individual successfully influenced his team at Acme Co to transition from jQuery and vanilla JavaScript to React, thus improving the team's feature throughput by 20%.
• The strategy for migrating a monolithic application to a microservices architecture entails assessment and planning of the current system, starting small with non-critical components, establishing robust infrastructure including container orchestration and CI/CD pipelines, ensuring training & upskilling of the team, handling complicated data management, implementing continuous monitoring and feedback loops, maintaining regular stakeholder communication, and pre-emptively addressing potential challenges such as data inconsistencies or increased network latency.