The 9 most-asked engineering manager interview questions (+ answers)

"There are three main strategies I use to support my team's professional development

Firstly, I collaborate closely with each team member to create individualized development plans. By understanding their career aspirations, strengths, and areas for improvement, I can identify relevant training opportunities, mentorship, or stretch assignments that align with their goals.

I build on this with regular feedback and performance discussions where I provide constructive feedback, highlighting their achievements and areas where they can further develop their skills. These discussions help us set clear expectations and create action plans for their professional advancement.

Lastly, I conduct bi-yearly skill assessments to identify areas for growth and determine the specific training needs of my team members. By offering access to relevant training programs, workshops, or online learning platforms, I empower them to acquire new skills and stay updated with industry trends, thus fostering their career growth."

"Of course, dealing with trade-offs is a big part of the job and so I have a clearly outlined process that I follow, which I'll explain for you now.

First I consider the objectives that we're trying to achieve and our priorities. By understanding the goals and priorities, I can evaluate the potential trade-offs in light of these objectives.

I'll then aim to increase my understanding the consequences, risks, and benefits associated with different choices. I assess the short-term and long-term implications on the team, project, resources, timeline, and overall business objectives.

If the trade-off decision is an important one that will affect people from outside the team, the next step is to involve key stakeholders, such as team members, project managers, product owners, or other relevant parties, in the decision-making process.

With input from the other key stakeholders, I'll evaluate the trade-offs by weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each option. Once the decision is made, I communicate the trade-offs and the rationale behind the chosen decision to the team and other stakeholders. By explaining the reasons behind the decision and the trade-offs involved, I encourage understanding and alignment among the team members.

Finally, once a decision is made and implemented, I continuously monitor the outcomes and adjust as necessary. This allows me to assess the effectiveness of the chosen approach, identify any unintended consequences, and make adjustments to minimize negative impacts or seize new opportunities that may arise."

"In my previous role our team was tasked with scaling a customer-facing web application to accommodate a rapidly growing user base. Here's how we approached the situation:

First, we conducted a thorough performance analysis of the existing system to identify bottlenecks and areas of improvement. We examined various aspects such as response times, database queries, server resource utilization, and network latency.

Based on the performance analysis, we then developed a scalability plan that outlined the necessary steps to scale the system effectively. We identified the key areas that required attention, including database optimization, horizontal scaling, and caching mechanisms.

Let me dive into these three areas a bit more. To improve database performance, we identified and optimized slow-performing queries, added appropriate indexes, and optimized data retrieval operations. We also implemented database caching strategies to reduce the load on the database server.

For horizontal scaling, we added more servers to the infrastructure and used load balancers to distribute incoming traffic across multiple server instances, ensuring efficient resource utilization and improved response times.

And we also implemented caching mechanisms to reduce the load on the application servers. We utilized both client-side caching and server-side caching techniques, such as Redis, to cache frequently accessed data and static content.

Once these optimizations were made, we conducted comprehensive performance testing to simulate high load scenarios and identify any performance bottlenecks. Through load testing, stress testing, and performance profiling, we iteratively optimized the system to handle increased volumes of user traffic.

We also implemented robust monitoring tools to track system performance and resource utilization in real-time. This allowed us to identify thresholds and triggers for automatic scaling. We set up auto-scaling configurations that would dynamically adjust the number of server instances based on traffic patterns and resource usage.

By implementing these strategies, we successfully scaled the system to accommodate the growing user base. This resulted in improved performance, reduced response times, and enhanced overall user satisfaction."

"Sure, this happens from time to time at any company. My approach to handling this situation would be as follows.

First, I'd want to be sure that I was communicating the importance of teamwork and collaboration to the entire team. So I'd double down on defining and communicating clear expectations regarding mutual support and shared success.

I would then hold a meeting with the individual to provide feedback, highlighting specific instances where their behavior or actions have negatively impacted teamwork. I'd want to understand their perspective as there could be many very understandable root causes for their behavior (cultural differences, trying to impress, etc).

I would seek to frame the conversation as positively as possible and offer some specific guidance on how they can improve their collaboration skills and emphasize the benefits of being a team player.

I'd also show some flexibility - there are some people who perhaps find it hard to connect with other people and prefer to work on their own - and I would be willing to tweak some of our ways of working, within reason, to accommodate the team member's needs.

After this meeting I would hope to see some improvement in the individual's approach to what we have discussed, and I would seek to reinforce any improvements with positive feedback and acknowledgement.

If, however, improvement was not forthcoming, I would need to draw up an action plan with specific objectives around collaboration and positive cooperation. I would explain that if the individual fails to meet these behavioral targets over the next 3 to 6 months, they may lose their position on the team.

In this case I would assess with the HR team whether there were any opportunities for this team member elsewhere in the company.

If not, I would need to work with HR to start an off-boarding process. I would be reluctant to lose a good engineer but my team always comes first and anything that negatively affects their performance and motivation must be dealt with."

Example behavioral questions asked in engineering manager interviews

Culture fit

• Tell me about yourself (Video tips)
• 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?
• How would you grow a team x 10?
• 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 (Written solution)
• Design WhatsApp (Written solution)
• Design TikTok (Video solution)
• 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
• Design a short URL system (Written solution)
• 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? (Written solution)
• How would you use a load balancer for memcache servers?
• How would you design Google Docs? (Written solution)
• 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)