The ultimate guide to engineering manager interviews. Developed by FAANG engineers, prep faster with proven strategies, real-world questions, and a structured approach. Get interview-ready in hours.

Engineers working as individual contributors may want to switch to management roles in the middle of their careers. A significant part of this transition will involve preparing for the engineering manager (EM) interview. This course is meant for folks preparing for an EM interview, enabling them to systematically cover the often-asked questions and strategies to come up with good answers.
The course begins with education about the EM role and the interview process for this role. It then covers the patterns and strategies to answer typical management questions in a story-like fashion. These involve people management, project and cross-functional management, and behavioral questions.
The course has been prepared by experienced engineering managers and directors for top-tier tech companies with years of experience giving and taking interviews for this role. This course will help you to persuasively present your own management experience during the interview and get your dream offer.

Acing the Engineering Manager Interview

Firing an employee is a difficult and taxing process. Not everyone has had the experience of being forced to let a team member go, but when it happens, you're expected to conduct yourself gracefully and make sure the process is as smooth as possible. As a manager, you'll experience some emotional strain from this incident as well. 



# What the interviewer is looking for
- Whether or not you have had this experience, how well you understand the process, and what input you use to make this decision.  
- How you manage communication with that employee.
- How you manage communication with the rest of the stakeholders.
- How well you document a strong case to make it happen.
- Signs of mental resilience. Firing someone is a difficult process to get through, and your interviewer would like to see if you’re emotionally mature enough to go through with it.


# What a good answer looks like

“I have had the experience of managing out someone on my team. We had an offshore member who was one of the smartest people we had recruited during the ideation phase. However, as the project matured and we were developing the product at a faster pace and had more dependencies, one of them, let’s call them B, started struggling to perform. I got signals from the other team members about this too, so I decided to dive in to see what was going on. I spoke to B and presented data on what our goals actually were and what the output looked like. I tried keeping the atmosphere as easygoing as possible so that they felt comfortable enough to open up to me, in case they were dealing with any problems. They were initially dismissive but eventually came around to acknowledging their low performance and promised to improve. I dug into the root cause of the problem but could not find anything.

Their low productivity continued despite that. I started to document it and involved HR and other relevant senior people. Eventually, we put B on a performance improvement plan for two months. It was a very structured program with clear and easy-to-achieve goals. I documented B’s progress daily and provided whatever support was needed to help B improve. At the end of the program, they only scored around 50 to 60 percent on the improvement plan. It was hard, but it was important that we let them go. They were having an impact on the rest of the team’s productivity and morale, so we couldn’t risk that worsening.

We never got a hint of why their performance was so poor. They had the skills and competence for the job, but their performance wasn’t up to par. We did everything we could to figure out what was going wrong, but they never offered an answer. Nonetheless, we made sure to give them a respectful send-off. We held a team meeting where we thanked them for their contributions and said goodbye.”








 


Let's review the standards by which an interviewee may be dismissed.

Introduction

The EM Interview Loop

Management Interview Patterns and Strategies

People Management Questions

Project and Cross-functional Management

Behavioral Questions

Have You Ever Fired a Low Performer?