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Key takeaways:
- Engineering manager interviews are heavy on behavioral rounds. Compile leadership anecdotes and practise telling them concisely.
- Know your leadership style – and your gaps: explain what kind of leader you are with concrete examples, and address thin areas honestly. It signals more than bluffing.
- Don’t underestimate the technical rounds. Every loop includes them.
Regardless of how many years of experience you have under your belt, interviewing for a new engineering manager role is a daunting prospect. Perhaps more intimidating, however, is the idea of interviewing for a position you’ve held but have never interviewed for before.
Like plenty of my peers, I have only ever moved laterally into the engineering manager role. I have interviewed as an individual contributor (IC), and later moved into the management track after establishing myself within the company. I’ve made this jump twice in my career.
However, I recently found myself in the position of needing to interview for a management role for the first time.
When I was trying to prepare for my interview conversations, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had never gone through an engineering manager interview loop before. After a few different rounds and interview loops, I started to pinpoint patterns across different companies and saw similarities in their hiring processes.
While there can be a great deal of variability in how a company conducts their engineering manager interviews, the signals that they’re screening for are the same. Here are some tips on how to effectively prepare for the engineering manager interview loop.
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Develop a story bank
The fundamental difference between the IC and engineering manager interview loops are the leadership screening rounds. While IC interviews tend to have at least one behavioral component to them, those conversations are usually focused around collaboration skills and cultural fit.
On the other hand, the manager interview loop often includes multiple behavioral rounds that are focused on management and leadership skills. These screening rounds include specific questions around your previous experiences as a leader, and you should expect that they will be quite different from the ones you have been asked when interviewing as an IC.
While each company will approach these rounds differently, it’s likely that you will be asked about a few common management challenges like dealing with poor performance, hiring engineers, promoting engineers, dealing with conflict and difficult situations, and managing projects and deadlines.
You may be asked to roleplay through a situation with a would-be engineering report, or you may be asked to talk through a case study for instituting a new process on a team.
Given that interviews are limited by time constraints, it’s important to be able to answer questions quickly and concisely, which means that preparation is essential. Compiling a list of notable anecdotes, learnings, and challenges you’ve experienced as a leader – also known as a “story bank” – is a great way to set yourself up for success.
If you’re like me, you may have already developed lists like these throughout your career as an IC. As you prepare for engineering manager interviews, you’ll want to make sure your story bank captures the full breadth of your skillset as a leader. This is a great time to reference any documents and artifacts from your previous jobs; for example, if you’ve built hiring processes from the ground up. Referring to documentation from that time in your career can help you in articulating your perspectives on hiring in your story bank.
After you have jotted down your stories, it’s time to practice how you tell them. Hiring managers and interview panels will be assessing not just the content of your experience, but also the way that you communicate them. The STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) can be an effective framework to help ensure that your answers are succinct. Remember, you can always elaborate on your experiences in follow-up questions, too.
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Understand your leadership style and identify gaps
In addition to questions about specific scenarios, you will also be asked about your leadership style and management philosophy. It’s worth meditating on this before you meet with a hiring manager.
Once you have your story bank built up, take some time to reflect on what kind of manager you are, and be ready to explain why.
For example, if you consider yourself a servant leader, come prepared with examples of how you’ve empowered engineers on your team to achieve shared goals.
Similarly, if you are a hands-on, player-coach leader, you should be willing to answer questions about when you might choose to dig into the codebase versus when you would choose to step back.
This is also a good time to identify any gaps in your leadership experience. For example, if you don’t have much experience managing poor performance, it’s worth marinating on how you would handle such a situation if you ran into it today. Being able to address gaps in your experience and skillset can help send a positive signal to hiring managers when they ask probing questions.
Technical preparation
Finally, every interview loop will involve at least one (but sometimes many!) technical rounds. The amount of preparation you’ll want to do will depend heavily on the role that you’re interviewing for, and the expectations will vary based on how much technical depth is required in the day-to-day of the job.
A position that is very hands-on will unsurprisingly involve more rounds than one that is much more people management focused. For positions that skew heavily towards the player-coach style of management, you should be prepared for code screens, system design and architecture interviews, and even pair programming interviews.
Given the rapidly-changing impact of AI on the industry, you can also expect AI-focused questions. Be prepared to talk about what tools you use and how and when you use them. You may be explicitly asked or expected to make use of AI tooling during an interview, so be ready to apply your skills in practice.
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Keep practicing for your engineering manager interview
Whether you’re completely new to the engineering manager interview process, or a seasoned manager who is dusting off their resume and kicking off their job search, preparing for the interview process undoubtedly demands self-reflection, effort, and time.
However, the prework that you do ahead of your interviews will pay dividends the more that you hone your interviewing skills.
Interviewing is a hard and sometimes soul-crushing process. Don’t be disheartened if, even after all of your preparation, you face a rejection. Always ask for feedback – in the worst case, you won’t get an answer, but in the best case scenario, the feedback may provide some insights that will allow you to improve for next time.
Engineering manager interviews can vary widely, and it can take a few different rounds to understand what your strengths and weaknesses are and how to focus your efforts ahead of the next interview loop.
Interviewing is incredibly subjective. Even if a company passes on you, remember that this is not a personal failure or a reflection of your capabilities and potential. It’s more likely that you were just not a good fit for a specific team’s needs at a given moment in time.
Even if it takes awhile, keep at it, and know that each loop that doesn’t turn into an offer is a chance to polish your interview skills, refine your story bank, and practice telling your leadership story.
