Software Engineering Practices Topics
Covers industry-standard practices for building maintainable, high-quality software, including code quality, maintainability, documentation, and effective technical communication within engineering teams.
Technical Excellence and Engineering Practices
Practices and cultural habits that maintain high engineering standards across teams. Topics include establishing and enforcing code review standards, testing strategies, continuous integration and delivery practices, documentation norms, knowledge sharing, learning culture, and measurable engineering health metrics. Also includes approaches to mentor engineers, build technical competency across the team, and structure learning programs that raise the whole organization.
Balancing Innovation and Operational Stability
Describe frameworks for balancing investment in new features or technologies with maintaining operational stability and managing technical debt. Cover criteria for when to invest refactor or preserve legacy systems testing and rollout strategies rollback plans and how to communicate trade offs risks and cost to stakeholders.
Technical Debt and Trade Offs
Framing technical debt and trade offs in business terms and facilitating pragmatic decisions between short term delivery and long term maintainability. Cover how to identify types of technical debt, build business cases for refactoring or infrastructure work, negotiate allocation of sprint capacity, quantify risks, and track debt reduction over time. Also include communication techniques to help product and engineering stakeholders understand the technical and business consequences of deferring technical work while preserving team health.
Scaling Developer Productivity and Experience
Approaches to increase team velocity and reduce friction as organization and codebases grow. Topics include improving feedback loop times, build and test performance, creating internal tooling and scaffolding, documenting conventions, automating repetitive tasks, improving developer onboarding, creating shared libraries and templates, and measuring productivity improvements. Candidates should propose concrete initiatives, discuss trade offs, and explain how to measure impact.
Innovation and Operational Excellence
Assess how a candidate balances investment in experimentation and new technologies with the need to maintain operational reliability and long term maintainability. Topics include frameworks for prioritizing experiments versus platform stability, risk assessment for adopting new tools, rollout strategies such as feature flags and canary deployments, investing in automation and observability, managing technical debt, and creating feedback loops from production metrics to influence priorities. Interviewers will probe concrete examples of tradeoffs made, how outcomes were measured, and how processes were used to reduce risk while enabling innovation.