Senior Staff Engineer Interview Questions
Go Back1. Can you describe your last successful software development project, and what factors helped you achieve this?
2. What is one decision you made in your career that you would like to have the chance to do differently?
3. Can you walk me through the process you would use to design an application that helped users manage their company health benefits?
4. How do you resolve disagreements with product or project managers when collaborating with them on a development project?
5. How do you go about monitoring a development project's milestones and completion stages?
6. Do you have experience using open-sourced web development environments, such as Django or Ruby on Rails?
7. What is your experience managing IT resources in a cloud environment, and do you prefer to use the Google Cloud Platform, AWS, or Azure?
8. How would you design a program so it can easily scale?
9. What is the advantage of refactoring a class?
10. Can you discuss the differences between functional and object-oriented programming, and which type do you prefer?
11. What is your methodology for assessing the efficiency of an existing process?
12. Which software development tools do you routinely use, and why would you recommend these for our company?
13. What are some of your key values which contribute to your performance as a senior staff engineer?
14. What is a key achievement that you feel led to your advancement to a senior staff engineer position?
15. What was the largest engineering team you led, and what were some of the challenges you encountered?
16. When creating a software development team, do you prefer to hire experienced staff engineers or recent graduates? Why?
17. How do you develop the members of your team to move to the next level in their careers?
18. Can you tell me about a project on which you were the team leader and did not achieve the organization's expected results?
19. At what point in your career did you decide to move into a leadership role, and how did you prepare for this?
20. What are some of the ways you support your team when they are working on projects?
21. How would you prepare to make a presentation to a business manager who has asked for your recommendation between two technologies?
22. Can you describe some of the factors you address when consulting with stakeholders on a new development project?
23. What are some of the methods you use to upgrade the skills of your development team?
24. What do you consider when deciding whether to use a NoSQL solution instead of an SQL one?
25. What are the parameters you consider when creating data tables?
26. What types of tools do you use to ensure the performance of the given architecture?
27. How would you justify the cost and disruption of upgrading to a newer version of the software an organization is currently using?
28. If you are assigned several different projects with competing requirements, schedules, and resource needs, how would you prioritize them?
29. How would you divide software development tasks among the members of your team?
30. What are your communication strategies for your team and the other project stakeholders when a development project falls behind schedule?