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

Defining your team’s and your project’s goals efficiently is crucial for success. As a manager, you need to ensure you involve your team in this process and figure out the best route together. The overall business goals of the company need to be analyzed so that they can be translated into your team’s goals. For the effective growth of the team, you need to maintain a balance between either being overambitious and taking on more than your team can handle, or taking on too little. 



# What the interviewer is looking for
- How you take business goals and translate them into a team roadmap.
- How you make sure your team is involved.
- How you make sure the tech backlog is addressed.
- How you make sure to do your homework from past projects to minimize the number of hidden issues that can pop up and slow down your team.
- How you make sure individual goals are aligned with company goals.

# What a good answer looks like

“Our team works on a three-month planning cycle. We make sure to do a team exercise at the start of each cycle, where we sit down and list all the things we need to tackle. A proportion of those things are requested from other teams on things they want us to deliver as dependencies. We figure out what our nonnegotiables are. The other things are more in line with the company goals, such as building a new coding pipeline. As a business, what are the things that our team needs to deliver? How are we maintaining and improving the reliability of our services?

An important component of all this is innovation. I make sure my team is very involved in setting the goals, and we always set aside a portion of the team’s bandwidth toward innovating, even at an industry level. In figuring out all of this, you sometimes realize you need to hire more people or get work done through other teams. It's tricky to make estimations in software engineering in general, but we try to take rough estimates to the higher side and then sign up for goals that would require 40% of the team’s bandwidth. That leaves 60% of our bandwidth free for urgent things that might come up or for situations when we might have to stay on call. We try to make sure the whole team’s priorities are lined toward these times. Therefore, if all engineers deliver on their own goals, then the team’s goals are achieved.”





Let's learn how to define your project and team goals.

Introduction

The EM Interview Loop

Management Interview Patterns and Strategies

People Management Questions

Project and Cross-functional Management

Behavioral Questions

How Do You Define Your Project and Team Goals?