Senior Software Engineer

Technical Depth and Judgment

Architecture Tradeoffs:

• How do you decide between building a new service and extending an existing one?
• Describe a time you made a deliberate tradeoff between speed of delivery and long-term maintainability.

Problem Solving:

• Walk through a complex production issue you diagnosed and resolved.
• How do you narrow down root cause when metrics, logs, and traces conflict?

Code Quality:

• What standards do you enforce in code reviews, and why?
• How do you refactor critical code safely in a live system?

System Design

Service Design:

• Design a service that handles spikes in traffic while keeping latency predictable.
• How would you design for graceful degradation when dependencies fail?

Data and State:

• How do you choose between strong consistency and eventual consistency?
• What caching strategy would you use for read-heavy endpoints?

Reliability:

• What reliability targets do you define for core services, and how do you measure them?
• How do you design for observability from day one?

Delivery and Execution

Planning:

• How do you break down large ambiguous work into milestones with clear outcomes?
• How do you decide what should be in v1 versus later iterations?

Incident Response:

• Describe your role during a high-severity incident.
• What makes a postmortem effective instead of performative?

Operational Excellence:

• How do you reduce toil for yourself and your team?
• What recurring signals tell you a system is becoming operationally expensive?

Leadership and Mentorship

Team Influence:

• How do you influence technical direction without formal authority?
• Tell me about a time you aligned engineers with conflicting technical opinions.

Mentorship:

• How do you mentor junior engineers while still delivering your own roadmap work?
• What does growth from mid-level to senior look like in practice?

Cross-Functional Collaboration:

• How do you partner with product and design when requirements are unclear?
• How do you communicate risk and uncertainty to stakeholders?

Behavioral Questions

Ownership:

• Tell me about a project you drove end-to-end that had measurable business impact.
• Describe a time you had to recover from a failed technical decision.

Decision-Making:

• Share an example where you chose the simpler solution over the technically ideal one.
• How do you know when to stop optimizing and ship?

Closing Questions

Team Fit:

• What engineering environment helps you do your best work?
• What expectations do you have for technical leadership at this level?

Candidate Questions:

• What questions do you have about architecture, team norms, or our roadmap?