The engineering manager interview questions include behavioral questions about past leadership experiences, technical questions testing knowledge of system design and architecture, and situational questions presenting real management scenarios, such as handling underperforming team members or technical crises. These questions assess a candidate’s ability to lead engineering teams, make technical decisions, and drive project success.
This guide’s interview questions for software engineers are designed to evaluate technical leadership capabilities, team management skills, and strategic thinking across all critical areas. This article explores key software engineering manager interview questions and answers that can help ensure a successful hire. By using these targeted questions, tech companies can effectively evaluate a candidate’s technical expertise, engineering knowledge, and leadership abilities.
An Engineering Manager is responsible for hiring, career development, performance reviews, and team health. They act as a bridge between the engineering team and other departments like product, marketing, and sales.
In smaller companies, those duties might be distributed among a founder, a senior engineer, or a tech lead. However, in larger companies, the role is well-defined and critical for scaling the engineering teams.
A good Engineering Manager will lead engineering teams, manage projects, and ensure they are completed on time and within budget. To find the right fit, it’s essential to ask the right interview questions that test their expertise in both engineering and leadership.
According to a Microsoft survey, there are 15 key critical attributes to identify highly effective software engineering managers. All attributes are rated quite high, with even the lowest, “builds relationships with team members”, receiving an average rating of 7.47. They are sorted here in order of importance:
In a scenario-based question, 75% of respondents preferred to hire a manager with average technical skills and excellent social skills over one with exceptional technical skills and competent social skills, indicating that social skills are more challenging to acquire. These respondents described “being technical” as having enough knowledge to understand the engineers’ work, facilitate discussions, and arbitrate dilemmas, rather than actively producing technical output or making technical decisions themselves.
In other words, assessing soft skills is key to the effective hiring of engineering managers, while technical skills are not as important. People management skills are better than technical management skills.
The best engineering manager questions are behavioral interviewing questions with a focus on leadership, teamwork, collaboration, and communication. A software engineer manager manages more people than projects; therefore, software engineer manager interview questions test soft skills more than technical skills. Although hard skills are important, coordinating teams and fostering a healthy work environment are the keys to an engineering manager’s success.
This is a classic behavioral interview question for a software engineering manager role. This is one of the most challenging and crucial aspects of people management: to handle underperformance. A good answer demonstrates empathy, structured thinking, and a focus on improvement, not punishment.
Ultimately, your candidate should convey that underperformance is a problem to be solved with coaching and support, rather than just a disciplinary issue. It highlights leaders who invest in their people.
This question is designed to assess your candidate’s ability to manage and develop a team’s top talent. A software engineer manager must identify and invest in high-achievers to keep them engaged, challenged, and growing within the company.
For instance, “I managed a senior software engineer who consistently delivered exceptional code and also took on mentoring responsibilities for junior team members, and they had such and such results.”
This question assesses a candidate’s ability to evaluate performance beyond simple coding metrics: a hallmark of a good manager. It shows they understand the broader, more nuanced contributions an engineer makes to a team and a company. The question also tests their commitment to fairness and objectivity.
Instead of just counting lines of code, an engineering manager should look at code quality. This includes code maintainability, test coverage, and documentation. A manager can also track an engineer’s impact through their code review feedback, the help they provide to others, and the number of pull requests they approve. This shows they are actively contributing to the team’s shared codebase and raising the bar for everyone.
The most important thing is to set expectations together. Sit down with each engineer and discuss their goals and what success looks like for them and the team. This ensures they feel a sense of ownership over their performance plan and understand what is expected of them.
There is a tension between developer autonomy and business alignment. This question goes beyond technical skills to probe leadership, communication, and strategic thinking.
Can an engineering manager connect a team’s technical choices to the company’s business goals? A good manager understands that technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself. They can explain to their team why a certain approach is necessary to solve a business problem.
This question is a test of your candidate’s ability to communicate difficult decisions. They need to show openness to their team’s concerns and explain business decisions without dismissing them. Such managers bridge business requirements with technical context.
A software engineering manager must act as a bridge between leadership and their team. This question is designed to measure the effective translation of high-level business strategy into engineering work. The translation also demands advocacy for the team’s needs and ideas.
Can the candidate understand and communicate the ‘why’ behind top-down initiatives? Engineering managers don’t just execute orders but understand their business context. On the other hand, a good manager doesn’t just push top-down work. They create space for bottom-up innovation.
This question tests your candidate’s commitment to empowering their team, which is crucial for morale and retention.
This question assesses a software engineering manager’s ability to prioritize team health and sustainability even under intense pressure. It goes beyond project management. You must examine empathy, strategic thinking, and leadership.
Ask yourself if your candidate treats the team as a disposable resource or as a valuable, long-term asset. Do they wait for burnout to happen, or do you have strategies to prevent it? An engineering manager needs foresight and a focus on long-term team health.
When interviewing a new team member, the non-technical qualities an engineering manager prioritizes are collaboration, problem-solving mindset, and ownership. These are often better indicators of long-term success on a team than raw technical skill alone.
Collaboration is the ability to work effectively with others. A great engineer doesn’t just write code; they elevate the team. Your candidate must look for someone who is a good listener, provides constructive feedback, and can communicate complex ideas clearly to both technical and non-technical peers.
An engineer with a strong problem-solving mindset is intellectually curious, resilient, and focused on finding solutions, not just executing tasks. They aren’t afraid to say, “I don’t know,” but they will also say, “I’ll find out.”
Ownership is about taking full responsibility for a task or a feature, from its design to its deployment and maintenance. A person with a strong sense of ownership doesn’t just complete a ticket and walk away; they follow through and care about the outcome.
Assess a software engineering manager’s full range of people management skills, from nurturing high-performers to managing underperformance. It’s a comprehensive question that looks for both empathy and firmness, and an ability to handle the full lifecycle of an employee’s career on your team.
It’s easy to talk about success. This question forces a manager to discuss both the wins and the losses, demonstrating a realistic and mature perspective on management. It shows your candidate is not just a cheerleader or a social butterfly, but can handle the difficult parts of the job as well.
An engineering manager acts as a leader and a teammate, even when they don’t have direct authority. It evaluates their proactiveness, communication, and problem-solving skills in a peer-to-peer context. A software engineer manager is a leader who can identify and address issues for the good of the entire organization, not just their own team.
The question focuses on “support,” not “criticism.” It allows a candidate to demonstrate their ability to approach a sensitive situation with empathy and a collaborative spirit, rather than a competitive one.
A candidate must demonstrate understanding of the engineering team’s health and effectiveness. It evaluates your candidate’s ability to think systematically, diagnose team-level issues, and implement strategic solutions. The best software engineer managers are process-oriented leaders who can identify bottlenecks and improve efficiency.
A strong candidate will talk about how they measured the success of the new process and how they’ve refined it over time. This demonstrates a commitment to data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement.
Introducing a new process can be met with resistance. The second part of the question tests their ability to lead change, get buy-in from their team, and ensure the new process is actually adopted and not just ignored. For example, according to “DevOps for Dummies”, by Emily Freeman, DevOps implementation is met with resistance, especially from management. How does your candidate navigate with other managers?
And what happens when something goes wrong? A good engineering manager focuses on identifying process or system failures, not individual mistakes. This builds a culture of psychological safety.
Your candidate will likely manage cross-functional conflicts and act as a liaison between the engineering team and the rest of the business. These conflicts will test their communication skills, empathy for different perspectives, and their ability to find a resolution that satisfies multiple stakeholders.
This is a direct test of your negotiation and de-escalation skills. A good engineering manager can resolve a disagreement constructively and professionally, rather than letting it devolve into a “them vs. us” situation.
The question specifically asks how they “facilitated communication.” A good software engineer manager here isn’t just a passive observer but an active participant who sets up the right conversations and ensures everyone is heard.
A strong candidate shows growth as a leader and manages increasing complexity. It goes beyond skills as a first-line manager to the strategic mindset needed for more senior roles. Here, the engineering manager’s impact comes from empowering others rather than direct contribution. The goal is learning how your candidate transitioned from managing individuals to managing a system of teams and stakeholders.
As teams grow, a manager can’t be in every meeting or approve every decision. The question tests their ability to delegate effectively and empower their team leads or senior engineers to make decisions.
Managing a larger team also means their communication needs to be more structured and intentional. Ask yourself if the candidate ensures information flows efficiently both up (to leadership) and down (to your team).
A more complex set of stakeholders (e.g., directors, product VPs, other engineering managers) requires a different level of relationship management. Can the candidate build trust and influence across the company?
As a manager scales, their focus shifts from individual performance to team-level processes. They’re now responsible for the health of a system, not just the sum of its parts.
Do your candidate understand what their stakeholders care about? A good answer shows they can move beyond technical jargon and focus on business value, risk, and opportunity. An engineering manager doesn’t just explain what technical processes are being done by the team, but why they matter to the company’s goals.
A great response shows that the candidate understands that a marketing director cares about the launch date, not the database schema, and a CEO cares about revenue and user engagement, not code commits. By simplifying complex topics, they build trust with stakeholders.
Instead of saying, “We have to refactor the monolith,” they know they must say, “We need to address this issue because it’s slowing down our ability to launch new features, which impacts our market share.”
A software engineering manager understands the team dynamics and their ability to cultivate a positive, productive work environment. In fact, according to the previously mentioned Microsoft survey, cultivating a positive working environment is the most appreciated skill for an engineering manager.
This question goes beyond technical management to probe their emotional intelligence, commitment to psychological safety, and practical strategies for building a cohesive unit. A toxic environment will drive away even the best engineers.
A high-performing team is one where members feel safe to take risks, ask questions, and admit mistakes without fear of judgment. A candidate must know more than just read a book on team building, but also have actionable strategies.
A potential software engineer manager is not just a leader; they develop future leaders. This goes beyond managing the career paths of others. A candidate must be able to identify management potential, provide strategic guidance, and empower others to take on leadership roles.
As a manager, the primary tool is no longer a text editor but communication. An engineering manager must learn to translate complex technical issues into business terms, facilitate difficult conversations, and build trust through transparency. Success is not about individual code output. It’s about the collective output and success of the entire team.
To nurture leadership, your candidate must look for engineers who are not only technically excellent but also show a genuine interest in people, take ownership beyond their code, and act as a positive influence on their peers. They create opportunities for their mentees to practice, having them lead a specific project, run a team meeting, or mentor a junior developer.
This question is not about technical challenges; it’s about your candidate’s ability to handle the human side of management. They must navigate a difficult situation with empathy, fairness, and a clear process to preserve team cohesion. Can your candidate recognize and understand the underlying emotions and motivations driving the conflict? A great manager looks beyond the surface-level disagreement to find the root cause.
A manager’s job in a conflict is not to pick a side but to facilitate a resolution. A good response will show that they don’t just “wing it.” An engineering manager has a structured, repeatable process for handling conflict, which ensures fairness and consistency. The ultimate goal is to resolve the conflict in a way that allows the team to continue working together effectively. The outcome they describe will show their ability to prioritize team cohesion and productivity.