Leadership & Team Development Topics
Leadership practices, team coaching, mentorship, and professional development. Covers coaching skills, leadership philosophy, and continuous learning.
Engineering Decision Making and Leadership
Covers how technical leaders and engineers make architecture and implementation decisions while enabling team autonomy and organizational alignment. Areas include engineering judgment in trade offs between performance, reliability, maintainability, and speed; processes for making and communicating technical decisions; governance models such as centralized versus distributed decision making; handling cross team disagreements; managing technical debt; and establishing accountability for technical outcomes. Candidates should show methods for gathering engineering data, involving relevant stakeholders, and ensuring decisions are followed and revised as needed.
Mentoring, Developing Others, and Ownership of Team Growth
At mid-level, you're expected to mentor junior team members. Prepare a story: someone who reported to you or worked closely with you whom you developed. What was their initial gap? What did you do to help them grow? How did they improve? Example: 'A junior TPM on my team struggled with executive communication. I gave her feedback on her status presentations, coached her through a few runs, and eventually had her lead one. She's now confident presenting to VPs.' Show that you invest in people and take pride in their growth.
Individual Mentoring and Coaching
Covers mentoring, coaching, and developing individual contributors across career stages from entry level to senior. Interviewers evaluate one on one coaching skills and structured mentoring approaches, including diagnosing mentee needs, setting growth goals, designing tailored learning and career plans, giving constructive feedback, running effective reviews or critiques, delegating progressively challenging work, scaffolding learning, and creating psychological safety. This topic also encompasses supporting promotions and transitions, balancing technical skill coaching with leadership and career coaching, measuring mentee progress and development outcomes such as promotions, increased ownership, retention or improved performance metrics, and contributing to succession planning. Candidates should be prepared to give concrete examples of mentees, the actions taken to teach or correct behavior, how they documented or institutionalized learnings, and how they adapted style for different learners while preserving individual development.
Team Leadership and Mentorship
Covers leading teams and using mentoring and coaching as tools to raise team performance and build long term capability. Interviewers probe experience leading small teams or projects, designing development plans and succession strategies, delegating and creating stretch assignments, conducting performance management and career conversations, hiring and onboarding, and building a culture of psychological safety and continuous learning. This topic also includes facilitation of team growth sessions, peer review and critique practices, establishing playbooks and processes that scale coaching, influencing without authority, and measuring team level outcomes such as promotion rates, ownership shifts, quality or velocity improvements, and retention. Candidates should demonstrate frameworks they use to develop others, examples of measurable impact achieved through developing people rather than only personal contributions, and how they amplified their influence by enabling others.
Technical Leadership and Mentorship
Focuses on leading technical direction and developing individual engineers or technical contributors through mentoring, technical guidance, and advocacy of best practices. Topics include influencing architecture and design decisions without formal authority, driving initiative and ownership on infrastructure and tooling projects, establishing technical standards and code review practices, promoting testing and quality assurance, security and cryptography influence, coaching through pair programming and reviews, growing mid level engineers into senior roles, and demonstrating impact through mentee progression and adoption of improved technical practices. Candidates should be ready to describe specific technical initiatives they led, how they persuaded stakeholders, methods used to mentor and develop technical skills, and examples of measurable outcomes.
Infrastructure Talent and Organization Building
Covers strategies for building and scaling effective infrastructure teams and talent pipelines. Topics include role definition and specialization, recruiting and interview practices, onboarding and training programs, mentorship and career ladders, skills assessment and continuous learning, team structures for platform and operations work, cross functional collaboration models, retention and performance management, succession planning, and aligning team capabilities with business priorities. Candidates should explain approaches to develop skills, measure team health, and adapt structure as technology and scale evolve.
Continuous Learning and Knowledge Leadership
Staying current with infrastructure trends and technologies. Contributing to team learning through documentation, brown bag sessions, or mentoring. Driving adoption of new tools or practices. Building organizational knowledge.
Conflict Resolution and Performance Management
Techniques for handling interpersonal conflict, resistance to change, and individual performance issues while preserving relationships and team effectiveness. Topics include preparing and delivering difficult feedback, mediating disputes, running restorative or problem solving conversations, distinguishing behavior from intent, documenting expectations, and escalating or invoking formal performance processes when required. Interviewers assess maturity in balancing candor and empathy, in facilitating durable resolutions, and in preventing conflict recurrence.
Leadership Philosophy and Impact Multiplier Capability
Your philosophy on technical leadership and how you multiply impact through others. Evidence that you elevate those around you, not just deliver personally. Vision for how infrastructure leaders should operate and contribute to organizational success.