65 engineering manager interview questions (plus answers)

“To clarify, I’m going to design the data schema, database architecture, and choose a database technology to use for the tiny URL implementation, assuming a simple in memory or local store file would not be suitable for this system.

Given a network with about 300 million daily active users, let’s say 20% (60 million) are frequent original posters who post roughly 1 URL a day, meaning we’d need to create about 60 million URLs a day, or 695 URLs a second. A single server won’t meet this requirement, so let’s go for a distributed system, with a caching layer for the links that get the most traffic.

Here’s an idea of what the system could look like:

A potential problem with this is that the whole system relies on the central ID generator being up all the time, which is a risk if it fails, and it may slow down the system. We could fix this by making a few more ID generators, which the API servers could go ‘round robin’ through to find a new number.”

“The first time I ever had to lead a team, I was a lead software engineer at a fintech startup. It was growing rapidly, so we ended up adding five new engineers to my team over the course of a few months.

One of my new engineers, Rob, told me during a one-on-one that he had a hard time working with another engineer, Ben. He explained that Ben was consistently rude and demeaning to him, to the extent that Rob was ready to change teams or even leave the company if it continued.

With Rob’s permission, I brought this up with Ben in our next one-on-one. Ben admitted that he likes to joke around and tease his coworkers, but that none of it was ill-intended. I encouraged him to speak to Rob directly and apologize for the misunderstanding, and to discuss what kinds of jokes Rob would and would not be comfortable with in the future. 

I offered to be present as a mediator, but Ben elected to initiate the conversation himself. I checked in with Rob in our subsequent one-on-ones, and he reported that his working relationship with Ben had greatly improved. Rob stayed at the company and eventually took my place as lead software engineer after I was promoted to engineering manager.”

“I’ve just left my role as an engineering manager at Thanus, an online gaming service, where I hired and developed my own team of 6 engineers from scratch. During my time there, I’ve revamped the product backlog by classifying work items into Epics, and I built the architecture to overhaul our risk and fraud services.

Before Thanus, I was a lead software engineer at Sweep, an online travel booking company. That’s where I got to try my hand at project planning with management teams for the first time, and where I built out the new service-oriented-architecture for our lodging services. 

Now, I’m looking to leverage these experiences to transition into a position like this one on the Chrome OS Platform, where I can play more of a part in big-picture strategy and provide technical guidance to top-notch teams, designing systems that affect millions of users.”

“In my last position, my team was working with a lead PM to build out a key feature of a new product that was about to be launched. I told the PM that my team would be finished a week ahead of schedule, as we had beat every deadline leading up to that moment. She rearranged the launch date of the product accordingly.

However, I soon realized that my team would not be finished testing the feature by the new deadline that I had imposed. I had allowed myself to get swept up in our previous progress without considering the intricacies of the last tests and details that would be necessary to finalize it.

As it was my mistake to move up the deadline, I took full responsibility for the mistake. I reported the issue to the lead PM and took it upon myself to speed up the process, so that the updated launch date could be met. I worked overtime every night for two weeks, alongside a few members of my team who elected to help. 

Ultimately, we were able to meet the updated launch date, and the feature we built ended up being a cornerstone of the product once it was launched.

This experience reminded me to make decisions based on data and observation, rather than based on emotion. I should have checked in with the team and looked deeper into the final testing before committing us to a deadline a week earlier than the team anticipated. Since then, I have been meticulous about deadlines and haven’t missed any.”

“I want to work at Amazon for two reasons.

First, I admire Amazon’s leadership principles, particularly the first one: customer obsession. This is something I've experienced first-hand when dealing with Amazon customer support myself, and it's a principle I’ve followed in the past when I took the lead on revamping my company’s technical support ticket architecture based on customer feedback.

Second, one of my co-workers used to be a software development manager at Amazon in Seattle. He has really great things to say about the company and often talks about how much he learned about development there. I look forward to being immersed in that environment.”

Example behavioral questions asked in engineering manager interviews

Culture fit

• Tell me about yourself
• Why are you leaving your current job?
• Why /Google/Amazon/Facebook etc?
• Tell me about a mistake you made and the lesson you learned from it
• How do you handle conflicts?
• Describe a time when a customer asked you for one thing, but you knew that they needed something else
• When was the last time you did something innovative?

• How do you deal with low performers?
• How do you deal with high performers? 
• Tell me about a time you developed and retained team members
• How do you manage your team’s career growth?
• Tell me about a difficult employee situation that you handled well/not so well
• What would you do with someone that had stayed at the same level for too long?
• How do you recruit good engineers?
• Give an example of how you helped another employee
• Tell me about a time you had a conflict with your supervisor and how you resolved it

• Tell me about what you've been working on over the last year
• As a manager, how do you handle trade-offs?
• Describe how you deal with change management
• Describe in detail a project that failed
• Describe a project in the past that was behind schedule and provide concrete steps that you took to remedy the situation
• Tell me how you would balance engineering limitations with customer requirements
• What was the largest project you've executed?
• Tell me about a time you needed to deliver a project on a deadline but there were multiple roadblocks and constraints to deliver. How did you manage that situation?
• Tell me about a project, product or system you worked upon. What were the design and technical problems you faced? How did you solve them?

Example system design questions asked in engineering manager interviews

• Design the next Twitter
• How would you design a system that reads book reviews from other sources and displays them on your online bookstore?
• How do you handle calls between clients and REST API services with increased volumes?
• Tell me in detail about the architecture of a project you've been involved with
• Tell me about a time you scaled a system
• Design a short URL system
• Design a real-time comment system to go under a Facebook post which may have millions of concurrent active users
• How would you design the Facebook newsfeed? 
• How would you use a load balancer for memcache servers?
• How would you design Google Docs?
• How would you design a ticketing platform?
• Design an in memory cache for webpages
• Design a boggle solver
• Design a distributed ID generation system
• How would you design Google's database for web indexing?
• How would you design a webpage that can show the status of 10M+ users including: name, photo, badge and points?
• How would you design a system that counts the number of clicks on YouTube videos?

Example coding questions asked at engineering manager interviews

1. Graphs / Trees (34%)

• "Given the root node of a binary search tree, return the sum of values of all nodes with value between L and R (inclusive)." (Solution)
• "Given a Binary Tree, convert it to a Circular Doubly Linked List (In-Place)." (Solution)
• "Given a binary tree, find the maximum path sum. The path may start and end at any node in the tree." (Solution)
• "Given an encoded string, return its decoded string." (Solution)
• "Given two words (beginWord and endWord), and a dictionary's word list, find the length of shortest transformation sequence from beginWord to endWord, such that: 1) Only one letter can be changed at a time and, 2) Each transformed word must exist in the word list." (Solution)
• "Implement an iterator over a binary search tree (BST). Your iterator will be initialized with the root node of a BST." (Solution)

• Implement a SnapshotArray that supports pre-defined interfaces (note: see link for more details). (Solution)
• "In a row of dominoes, A[i] and B[i] represent the top and bottom halves of the i-th domino.  (A domino is a tile with two numbers from 1 to 6 - one on each half of the tile.) We may rotate the i-th domino, so that A[i] and B[i] swap values. Return the minimum number of rotations so that all the values in A are the same, or all the values in B are the same. If it cannot be done, return -1." (Solution)
• "Your friend is typing his name into a keyboard.  Sometimes, when typing a character c, the key might get long pressed, and the character will be typed 1 or more times. You examine the typed characters of the keyboard.  Return True if it is possible that it was your friends name, with some characters (possibly none) being long pressed." (Solution)
• "Given an array nums of n integers where n > 1,  return an array output such that output[i] is equal to the product of all the elements of nums except nums[i]." (Solution)
• "Given a non-empty string s, you may delete at most one character. Judge whether you can make it a palindrome." (Solution)
• "Implement next permutation, which rearranges numbers into the lexicographically next greater permutation of numbers." (Solution)

• "Given a matrix and a target, return the number of non-empty submatrices that sum to target." (Solution)
• "Given a list of non-negative numbers and a target integer k, write a function to check if the array has a continuous subarray of size at least 2 that sums up to the multiple of k, that is, sums up to n*k where n is also an integer." (Solution)
• "Say you have an array for which the ith element is the price of a given stock on day i. If you were only permitted to complete at most one transaction (i.e., buy one and sell one share of the stock), design an algorithm to find the maximum profit." (Solution)

• "A strobogrammatic number is a number that looks the same when rotated 180 degrees (looked at upside down). Find all strobogrammatic numbers that are of length = n." (Solution)
• "Given a binary tree, find the length of the longest path where each node in the path has the same value. This path may or may not pass through the root. The length of path between two nodes is represented by the number of edges between them." (Solution)

• "We have a list of points on the plane.  Find the K closest points to the origin (0, 0)." (Solution)
• "Given two arrays, write a function to compute their intersection." (Solution)

• "A group of two or more people wants to meet and minimize the total travel distance. You are given a 2D grid of values 0 or 1, where each 1 marks the home of someone in the group. The distance is calculated using Manhattan Distance, where distance(p1, p2) = |p2.x - p1.x| + |p2.y - p1.y|." (Solution)
• "You are given two non-empty linked lists representing two non-negative integers. The digits are stored in reverse order and each of their nodes contain a single digit. Add the two numbers and return it as a linked list." (Solution)

• "A linked list is given such that each node contains an additional random pointer which could point to any node in the list or null. Return a deep copy of the list." (Solution)

• "Implement the following operations of a queue using stacks." Note: see more details at the following link. (Solution)