Leadership and Influence Track Record Questions

A broad record of leadership, influence, and change delivery across people, teams, and stakeholders. Candidates should present examples of building and scaling high performing teams, mentoring and developing engineers, resolving complex conflicts, and maintaining credibility with senior leaders. Describe measurable outcomes such as hiring and retention improvements, delivery of cross team initiatives, adoption of organizational practices, and how you built trust to drive decisions. Cover interpersonal skills like communication, negotiation, stakeholder management, and sustaining influence over time.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Senior leadership asks you to choose between investing in automation (reducing manual toil) and hiring additional headcount to improve reliability. Build a quantitative decision framework showing how you'd estimate costs, benefits (reduced MTTR, fewer incidents), time-to-value, and present a recommendation to executives with sensitivity analysis over a 12-month horizon.

MediumBehavioral

0 practiced

A high-performing engineer signals they are considering leaving due to perceived career stagnation. How would you conduct a stay interview, craft a personalized retention plan (career path, mentoring, stretch projects, compensation conversation), and present measurable outcomes to leadership to justify retention investments?

HardTechnical

0 practiced

A critical dependency is maintained by a small external team and frequently fails. With limited formal authority, describe how you'd build long-term influence to improve that dependency's reliability: escalation strategies, joint SLAs, shared postmortems, collaborative runbooks, and contractual or incentive-based approaches you could use.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Describe how you would introduce an error budget policy that influences release velocity. Explain the mechanics: how to surface budget burn, who decides to pause releases, how to communicate decisions to product teams and execs, and safeguards to avoid gaming the system.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

What metrics would you present to senior leadership to justify adding two SRE hires to support growth? Explain which quantitative data you'd collect (e.g., downtime cost, MTTR, on-call load, technical debt backlog), how you'd model ROI, and how you'd frame the ask to align with company priorities.

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