Skip to content
- How do you identify which technical problems are worth staff-level attention?
- Describe a time your work changed how multiple teams built software.
- How do you create an architectural direction that teams can adopt incrementally?
- What criteria do you use to decide when to standardize versus allow local variation?
- How do you evaluate and communicate technical risk before major implementation starts?
- Tell me about a time you prevented a high-impact failure through early design intervention.
- Design a platform component used by many product teams with different constraints.
- How do you handle compatibility and migration when APIs evolve?
- What approach do you use to set and enforce performance budgets across services?
- How do you reduce incident frequency in a distributed system with many owners?
- How do you design data boundaries to prevent cascading failures?
- What signals tell you that a domain should be split into separate services?
- How do you align technical strategy with business priorities over 12 to 18 months?
- How do you make sure platform investments produce measurable team productivity gains?
- Describe how you led a multi-team initiative without direct reporting lines.
- How do you keep large cross-team efforts moving when priorities shift?
- How do you document decisions so new teams can understand context years later?
- What belongs in an RFC versus a design doc versus a runbook?
- How do you coach senior engineers into broader technical leadership?
- How do you raise engineering quality standards without creating process drag?
- What review behaviors do you model to improve signal and reduce ego?
- How do you handle repeated quality issues from high-output teams?
- What evidence do you look for in staff-level candidates that is often missed?
- How do you calibrate interview signal across different domains and teams?
- Tell me about a time you changed a technical direction that initially faced resistance.
- Describe a disagreement with another senior leader and how you reached resolution.
- Share a case where goals were unclear but you still delivered meaningful outcomes.
- How do you prioritize when everything feels urgent and strategic?
- What do you expect from engineering leadership to make staff engineers successful?
- How do you define success in your first six months in a staff role?
- What questions do you have about technical strategy, architecture, and decision-making here?