Hiring manager interview questions
Your own projects, told in the first person: the decisions that were yours, what you traded away and what happened next.
- Looking at your take-home submission, what would you change with another day, and what did you leave out on purpose?
- Pick a project you are proud of. Which decisions were yours alone, and which would have happened without you?
- Pick one project from your résumé and take me through it in depth: the problem, your design, what broke and what you would change.
- Describe your current role in depth: what you own, how your team is organized and how your work reaches customers.
- How do you use AI coding tools in your daily work, and where do you not trust them?
- If I called the last customer you worked with, what would they say you did well and what would they say you missed?
- If you joined and were placed with a new customer next week, what would your first month look like?
- What is the hardest technical problem you have solved? Take me into the details.
- When a customer brings you a vague problem, what do you do in the first week?
- Your résumé mentions a data pipeline you built. Walk me through its failure modes and how you monitored it.
- How do you decide between building a custom solution for one customer and pushing for a product change?
- In your take-home you chose one approach over the obvious alternative. Defend that choice as if I were the customer’s architect.
- Present a past technical project to a mixed audience of engineers and executives, then take questions.
- What do you think are the biggest risks of the technology this company builds, and how should an engineer in the field act on them?