Question 1

How should I prepare for an engineering manager interview?

Accepted Answer

Engineering manager interviews at top tech companies are designed to evaluate both your leadership ability and technical expertise. You’ll typically face three types of interviews:

Leadership interviews. These focus on behavioral questions that assess your experience managing people, driving projects, and navigating team dynamics. You’ll need to demonstrate how you build teams, lead through ambiguity, and make thoughtful decisions.
System design interviews. You’ll be asked to design complex systems, explain architectural decisions, and discuss scalability, tradeoffs, and reliability. These interviews assess your technical knowledge and how you think through open-ended engineering problems.
Coding interviews. These assess whether you can write optimized code and help others improve theirs. You may be asked to solve algorithmic problems or review a code snippet and suggest improvements.

This is a senior role, so standards will be extremely high for both technical and behavioral assessments. Here's how you can prepare:

Clarify your leadership stories. Identify 8–10 key experiences that showcase how you’ve managed people, handled tough situations, and driven results. Practice behavioral questions using a structured approach like STAR or SPSIL and focus on outcomes, tradeoffs, and your role in team success.
Strengthen your system design skills. Review high-level architecture patterns, scaling strategies, and how real systems are built (e.g., queues, caching, database sharding). Practice common design prompts like designing an API rate limiter or a large-scale messaging system.
Brush up on coding foundations. Focus on problems involving arrays, strings, hash maps, and trees. Use platforms like LeetCode or interview practice portals to review algorithmic patterns and reinforce your fundamentals.
Simulate the real thing. Practice mock interviews with other engineering managers or coaches. This helps you get expert feedback, discover weak points, and build confidence under pressure.
Study the company-specific process. Each company emphasizes different areas—for example, Google leans heavily into system design and leadership, while others may prioritize hiring and team culture more explicitly.

For more guidance, read our engineering manager interview prep guide.

Question 2

What does {{page.skill.name|add_article}} interview coach do?

Accepted Answer

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Here's a more detailed look at what {{page.skill.name|add_article}} interview coach can do for you:

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Question 3

How will my {{page.skill.name}} interview coaching session work?

Accepted Answer

In a 1h mock interview session, you’ll spend 45 minutes being interviewed by your coach and they will give you feedback on your performance for 15 minutes. They will identify your weak points, give insightful, actionable advice on how to improve, and give you more confidence going into your real interviews.

In a more general preparation session, you can get your {{page.skill.name}} interview coach to help you structure your preparation, answer any questions you might have about your upcoming interview, and make more efficient use of your study time.

Question 4

How much does {{page.skill.name|add_article}} interview coach normally cost?

Accepted Answer

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Various factors affect what you might pay for interview coaching:

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Question 5

How is practicing with {{page.skill.name|add_article}} interview coach different to doing mocks with a friend or peer?

Accepted Answer

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Our coaches have all conducted interviews at top companies, so they know exactly what interviewers are looking for. They won’t just say “that sounded good”, they’ll tell you why something worked or didn’t, and how to make your answers tighter, clearer, and more impactful.

Friends or peers might be smart, but they’re not calibrated. A coach will push you on the right things, find your weak points, and give you a realistic sense of how you'd perform in a real interview. Plus, they can help you build a plan, identify gaps in your prep, and flag blind spots you didn’t know you had.

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