Organizational Strategy & Culture Topics
Organizational strategy, culture shaping, change management, and organizational dynamics. Includes culture initiatives, transformation, and organizational design.
Team Structure and Composition
Covers how teams are organized, who does what, and how work and accountability are distributed. Core areas include team size, roles and responsibilities, seniority mix, skills distribution, diversity of perspectives, reporting relationships and organizational structure, who reports to whom, and how a role fits into the broader organization. Also addresses cross functional dependencies and integration with other teams, handoff and workflow patterns, decision making models and ownership boundaries, autonomy versus centralized direction, code and design review practices, on call rotations and escalation paths, available resources and success metrics. Leadership and hiring topics include strategies for building balanced teams, identifying skill gaps, onboarding and mentorship programs, scaling teams from small to large while avoiding fragmentation, and setting short term and first year priorities for improving effectiveness. Candidates should be prepared to ask and evaluate questions about immediate peers and managers, domain responsibilities, and how the team is structured to deliver outcomes.
Culture and Values Fit
Assessment of how a candidate's personal values, behaviors, and day to day working style align with an organization's stated mission, values, and cultural norms. This includes demonstrating understanding of how values show up in decision making, engineering practices, and people processes; giving examples that evidence customer focus, ownership, collaboration, inclusion, or other prioritized values; and discussing how the candidate would contribute to belonging and psychological safety. Strong responses also acknowledge any differences, describe how the candidate would adapt or influence culture, and include questions that probe how the company measures and sustains cultural health.
FAANG Specific Technology and Culture
Understanding of what makes each FAANG company's technical challenges and culture unique. Google focuses on scale and distributed systems. Amazon emphasizes customer obsession and operational excellence. Meta focuses on mobile and infrastructure. Apple emphasizes hardware-software integration and user experience. Netflix is known for microservices and freedom and responsibility culture. Microsoft has become increasingly cloud-focused with Azure. Understanding each company's technical philosophy helps you source engineers who align with that culture.
Organizational Security Culture and Strategy
Covers how an individual contributes to and shapes a company wide security mindset and long term security strategy. Topics include designing and measuring security awareness programs, embedding security thinking across teams, balancing security with business velocity, elevating organizational security maturity, aligning security philosophy with company values, and contributing to team and organizational security priorities during onboarding and ongoing strategy work. Candidates should be able to articulate cultural levers, training and awareness approaches, cross functional collaboration with product and engineering, methods for measuring impact, and how to influence leadership and peers to improve security posture without blocking delivery.
Why Spotify Specifically
Behavioral interview question focusing on why a candidate wants to work at Spotify, assessing cultural fit, alignment with company values, and motivation. Demonstrates research about Spotify and the ability to articulate how the candidate’s skills and goals align with Spotify’s mission and culture.