Behavioral & Leadership
Soft skills, teamwork, and leadership questions
Tell me about a time when you had to lead your team through a major production outage. How did you handle the situation and what did you learn?
Describe a time you disagreed with a Product Manager about scope or timelines. How did you handle it and what was the outcome?
Tell me about a time you led a blameless postmortem. How did you ensure learning without blame?
Describe a situation where a bad on-call handoff caused problems. What did you do in the moment and what did you change afterwards?
Tell me about a time you were involved in a security incident. How did you contain, communicate, and coordinate?
Give an example of how you identified cloud cost waste and optimized it. What was the impact?
Tell me about a time you decided quickly to roll back a deployment. What signals guided your decision?
Share a time you mentored a junior engineer. How did you ensure growth without doing it for them?
Describe a time a critical dependency owned by another team blocked you. How did you unblock the work?
Tell me about a time you discovered a near-miss that could have caused data loss. How did you handle it and what changed?
Tell me about a time when you had to deliver a project under an extremely tight deadline. How did you manage priorities and expectations?
Describe a time when two team members had a conflict. What steps did you take to resolve the situation?
Tell me about a time you received tough feedback from a manager or peer. How did you handle it and what actions did you take afterwards?
Share an example where you had to present findings or results to senior leadership or executives. How did you prepare and deliver your message?
Tell me about a project that failed. How did you handle the failure, and what did you learn from the experience?
Describe a time when you had to work across multiple teams with competing priorities. How did you bring everyone together?
Tell me about a time you discovered a high-priority production bug just before a release. How did you handle it?
Share an example where your team faced scaling challenges due to sudden growth. What actions did you take to address them?
Describe a time when you had to decide between shipping fast and addressing technical debt. What approach did you take and why?
Describe a time when you had to work with a difficult stakeholder or client. How did you manage expectations and maintain the relationship?
Tell me about a time you had to escalate an issue to senior leadership. How did you communicate the urgency and impact?
Share an example of successfully working with a fully remote or distributed team. How did you ensure alignment and communication?
Tell me about a time when you unexpectedly had to step into a leadership position. How did you handle it?
Describe a time when your company went through a major change, like a merger or restructuring. How did you adapt?
Tell me about a time you had to manage a team member who was underperforming. What steps did you take and what was the outcome?
Describe a time when you had to give constructive or critical feedback to your manager or leader. How did you approach the conversation?
Tell me about a time when you had conflicting priorities from different stakeholders. How did you decide what to focus on?
Describe a situation where a critical customer issue was escalated to you. How did you resolve it and manage the relationship?
Tell me about a time when your team was experiencing burnout. How did you identify the issue, and what actions did you take to address it?
Describe a time you managed a project involving cross-timezone teams. How did you handle scheduling, collaboration, and communication?
Tell me about a time when you performed a root cause analysis after a failure. How did you conduct it, and what changes did you implement afterward?
Describe a time you had to conduct a high-stakes demo with executives or customers. How did you prepare and ensure success?