Engineering Manager Interview Questions and Answers

The responsibilities of an engineering manager are

• Managing the talents in the team, which includes the hiring and firing of resources as well as their promotion plans.
• Managing budgets
• Enhance team members to perform better
• Project management
• Connecting with multiple departments or teams in the company whenever needed.

Here the manager should work on creating the performance improvement plans with the agenda of getting or bringing that engineer back to the speed needed for this project. A manager needs to work closely with that engineer and track consistently how things are going as per the plan. The manager needs to provide all kinds of support that engineers needed at that time.

If the manager thinks or found no improvement in that engineer, he should look out for other positions in the company. If nothing is available in the company according to that engineer’s skills, he should be counseled out from the company.

In this question, you have to tell about the projects you were responsible for earlier (in the previous organization) with the duration. What do you achieve there, something more that benefits the company or business with clients?

Basically, you have to sell yourself here. Sounds weird, but that’s the reality and say all the good things that you did in your previous company. If you are a city manager and looking for a change then these Civil manager interview questions will help in cracking your interviews easily.

Being the team lead, it is my duty to ensure that I am dividing equal work among all my team members. To do this, I will create a list or tracker (a lot of project management tools are there now) that shows all the tasks that need to be done with some SLA, I will distribute these tasks among the three developers according to their abilities or key areas.

To ensure this, I would love to have the stand-up calls with the team on the daily basis. Following the agile methodology here, we will use the stand-up calls to assign or track the work, with this approach we can easily ensure that our project is running on or before the schedule. If at any point, I found that we might get delayed we can easily raise the alarm to client or business stakeholders and look out for the solution of getting delayed.

Tell the interviewer about your roles and actions that you had taken in your previous organization that helps your team members to upgrade themselves. Like, supporting them to take the training that the company is offering. Schedule sessions with the team members to share their knowledge with each other. Allow them to take the training and learnings from outside the organization and provide them all kinds of support needed, if possible.

This is a common situation for every engineering manager. We usually encounter such scenarios where we do not agree with the prioritization of tasks. In such cases, I raise my question and ask them to put some light on that particular task. After knowing their reason for giving that priority to the task, I got okay when their reasons looks genuine to me. If not, I stick to my words until I got satisfying answers from all the key stakeholders.

I try to support my team in providing and guiding all the ways that I can. I ensure that have all access to all the required tools. I also ensure that they are not over-allocated, if they are I work with them to prioritize their work and assign some to others, according to their bandwidth. I would also ensure to provide them KTs and training for the skills that they need to learn to work on this project. I would schedule the one-on-one calls with each of the team members to know about their growth planning and discuss their work-life balance and provide them the assurance of the things that I can do.