Project & Process Management Topics
Project management methodologies, process optimization, and operational excellence. Includes agile practices, workflow design, and efficiency.
Outcomes and Progress Tracking
Mindset and practices for defining success and tracking progress across projects programs and roles. Covers how to define measurable success criteria align work to objectives and key results and key performance indicators set baselines targets and guardrail metrics and choose appropriate review cadences. Includes team and agile measures such as velocity burndown cycle time sprint completion rates and capacity planning as well as program and product measures such as adoption usage business impact and technical health. Also addresses how to visualize progress with dashboards run regular tracking processes communicate status to different audiences and avoid misuse of metrics for punitive evaluation.
Monitoring Detection and Incident Response
Focuses on designing and operating logging, detection, and incident response capabilities. Candidates should be able to describe building logging pipelines, selecting and instrumenting telemetry sources, retention and indexing strategies, and integration with security information and event management systems. Topics include event modelling and structured logging, observability with metrics and distributed tracing, collection of platform audit logs such as Amazon Web Services CloudTrail and virtual private cloud flow logs, detection engineering and analytic rule design, alerting policies and threshold tuning to reduce false positives, incident classification and severity models, escalation procedures, runbooks and playbooks, incident commander and coordination responsibilities, stakeholder communication during incidents, and blameless postmortem practices to capture learning. Assessment focuses on measurable detection and response metrics such as mean time to detect and mean time to respond, design of automated mitigations and playbooks, and how detection feedback loops inform development and deployment.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Assesses the ability to work effectively across product management, engineering, design, and business functions. Topics include adapting communication styles for different audiences, clarifying roles and responsibilities, running effective cross functional meetings, aligning goals and success metrics, managing handoffs and dependencies between disciplines, and building durable working relationships across teams.
Cross Functional Collaboration and Influence
Evaluate strategies for coordinating across multiple engineering teams and functions that have competing priorities. Topics include designing alignment mechanisms, setting cadence and communication patterns, influencing without formal authority, negotiating trade offs, facilitating decision making, resolving conflicts, and managing competing priorities. Interviewers should look for examples that demonstrate the candidate ability to build consensus, escalate when necessary, and keep cross functional workstreams aligned to program goals.
Programming Fundamentals in Python and Go
Practical programming skills in Python and Go including implementation and reasoning about common data structures and algorithms, string manipulation, file input and output operations, and idiomatic error handling. Candidates should understand time and space complexity, write clear and maintainable code, and be comfortable with language specific constructs such as generator and comprehension patterns in Python and goroutines and channels in Go. Interviewers commonly assess these skills with short coding exercises, debugging tasks, and small design problems.
Leadership and People Development
Coach and develop others through regular feedback, mentoring, delegation, and creating stretch assignments. Demonstrate approaches to grow junior program managers, technical leads, and engineers by setting development plans, sharing career guidance, enabling learning opportunities, and fostering a culture of feedback. Include examples of how you measured growth, transferred responsibility, and scaled team capabilities.