Engineering Manager interview
at Google.

Tell-me-about-a-time stories on ownership, conflict, and impact — scored against this company's real values.

1. 01 Tell me about a time you turned around an underperforming engineer rather than managing them out.
2. 02 Describe how you handled a serious conflict between two strong senior engineers on your team.
3. 03 Tell me about a time you had to deliver a launch under heavy ambiguity with shifting requirements and limited headcount.
4. 04 Describe how you spotted and addressed burnout on your team before it caused attrition.

The hard screen for the craft itself — talked through out loud, not whiteboarded in your head.

1. 01 Walk me through how you'd review a system design your team proposed and the tradeoffs you'd push back on.
2. 02 How do you maintain technical credibility and make architecture calls while managing a growing team?
3. 03 Given a recurring production outage, how would you lead the incident response and the longer-term reliability fix?
4. 04 Implement or critique a solution to a coding problem to show how you'd assess your engineers' work in a code review.

Open-ended design of the systems this company actually runs, with the interviewer probing your tradeoffs.

1. 01 Design Google Maps ETA prediction and explain how you'd staff and sequence the project across your team.
2. 02 Design the system for serving YouTube video delivery at global scale and discuss the reliability tradeoffs you'd own.
3. 03 Design a notification system for Gmail and walk through how you'd break it into deliverable milestones for your team.
4. 04 Design a large-scale distributed storage system like Google's and explain how you'd organize the team to build it.