Informal Leadership and Influence Examples Questions
Highlight specific instances where you've demonstrated leadership as an IC: mentoring junior engineers and their growth, leading technical design discussions, driving architectural decisions, taking on tech lead or project lead roles, organizing team initiatives or learning sessions, improving team processes, or successfully managing cross-functional projects. Even small examples (mentoring one person, leading one important decision) demonstrate you've already started thinking like a leader.
EasyBehavioral
0 practiced
Describe a mentoring moment where you helped a junior engineer improve their technical writing (design docs, proposal, README, model cards). What exercises, feedback cycles, or templates did you use, and what measurable improvement did you see in their ability to write clear technical artifacts?
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Design a mentorship program to scale technical leadership among ICs across an ML organization of 50+ engineers. Include program goals, pairing or cohort mechanics, time commitments, incentives for mentors, skill curricula, methods to measure technical growth, and governance to keep quality consistent as the program scales.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Tell me about a time you influenced hiring decisions for your ML team—writing a job description, interviewing candidates, or advocating for an extra hire. What attributes did you prioritize (data skills, engineering rigor, product sense), and how did you convince hiring managers to make the hire?
MediumBehavioral
0 practiced
Provide an example where you facilitated consensus during a heated technical debate (for example batch vs online inference or model A vs model B). Describe facilitation techniques you used (break into smaller discussions, create decision matrix, time-boxed A/B tests), how you surfaced trade-offs, and how you documented the final decision.
EasyBehavioral
0 practiced
Tell me about a time as a machine learning engineer when you mentored a junior engineer (one-on-one or in a small group). Describe the situation, the specific skills or behaviors you focused on (e.g., feature engineering, debugging, testing, code reviews), the concrete coaching actions you took, and measurable outcomes (code quality, model performance, delivery speed, promotion, or confidence improvements).
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