Describe a time you were presented with a complex problem at work. What steps did you take to resolve it?
Raytheon interviews are known for including several behavioral questions. Asking about a candidate's ability to solve problems is a likely topic of discussion. Your interviewer wants to know if you have what it takes to overcome the likely challenges you will likely face regularly at Raytheon.
Describe the problem or challenge you faced. Provide enough context to help your interviewer understand the complexity as this will help them see the full value of the steps you took to resolve the issue. Be sure to include any benefits that were gained as a result of your actions.
"I had an engineer on my team that is incredibly intelligent and talented, but he did not enjoy working in teams. He often kept important details to himself and did not engage when he saw his teammates struggling. The manager of his team wasn't addressing the issue and did his best to assign the engineer projects he could work on alone.
As an engineering director, I knew this approach was not serving the individual or his teams in the long run. I set up a meeting with the manager and revisited my approach to team culture. We discussed several options for helping the engineer learn to engage more fully with the team and established a plan of action. Additionally, I met with the engineer to let him know I was the one pushing for change and that I saw the potential for him to add a lot of value if he could make a few adjustments.
I checked in with the engineer and his manager regularly. It took some time, but the engineer ultimately embraced his role as a subject matter expert. The quality of the work of his team has improved and I genuinely appreciated his willingness to change. I promoted him last year to an architect role and he is thriving."
"I worked on a project last year in which we were rearchitecting a number of services for a legacy system. The decision was made to move to AWS and we experienced a number of performance issues initially. As a senior engineer on the team, several of the junior engineers looked to me for guidance. I developed a strategy to research projects internally and at other companies that experienced similar issues. We divided the work up and our research ultimately led us to a series of fixed that helped get us where we needed to be."
