I went through the Engineering Manager loop at Rubrik across March and April. It was a demanding loop, yet among the better organized and more responsive ones I have done, and the people on the other side clearly put thought into how they ran it.
A bit of context: I had spent three years leading engineering teams that built search infrastructure and distributed systems. Rubrik appealed to me since it offered a chance to build big, data-heavy systems where I would own things for real and see the impact over the long run.
How I prepared and what helped
Nothing out of the ordinary, but I was intentional about a handful of things.
I redid most of my leadership stories in the STAR format and kept bending them toward the calls I made personally, not what the whole team delivered. Rather than assembling a giant library of anecdotes, I picked 8-10 genuine situations (conflict, ambiguity, expectations I missed, delivery trouble, people leaving, innovation, growing a team) and kept honing just those.
On system design I returned to the basics: scale, reliability, how data moves, and how things fail. Talking through designs aloud helped far more than just sketching them. The biggest shift for me was getting more explicit about tradeoffs, so that I said why I picked an approach and not only what I built.
The interview process
Every round had an obvious purpose.
System design, 2 rounds of 60 minutes each
These centered on design you could actually run: scale, reliability, coping with failures, and what a system does once it is live, as opposed to a neat architecture picture. The interviewers wanted bottlenecks and single points of failure found, design decisions and their tradeoffs spelled out, workflows explained step by step, and technology choices justified. Where the architecture could fail got the most attention by a wide margin.
Tech talk, 1 round of 60 minutes
A longer technical conversation. Getting a single correct answer mattered less than showing how clearly I could think through a system and lay out the tradeoffs.
Hiring manager round (people and project management, strategic thinking)
Mostly execution stories: how I get results, work through unclear situations, and see things through across several teams.
Leadership and mentorship round with the VP of Engineering
One of the most interesting rounds for me. The interviewer knew exactly where to push, and the follow-up questions were precise instead of boilerplate. Very fast it moved into the work I had really done, how I dealt with specific situations, and which decisions were mine.
Peer interaction round (team culture and engineering judgment)
This covered engineering principles, how a team collaborates, and my take on code quality, ownership and keeping a team healthy over time.
What stood out
Again and again they asked what I myself had done, and brushed past summaries of what the team did. Follow-ups were sharp and tied to my own details, most of all in the leadership rounds. The design discussions favored how things behave in the real world over an ideal architecture. Thinking clearly earned more credit than a rehearsed answer.
What worked for me
I drew on recent, real situations, not on polished interview stories. I didn't force a rigid structure onto each answer and simply stayed direct and clear. I was upfront about tradeoffs and didn't pretend each decision was the optimal one. I let the interviewer decide how far down to go, so I didn't front-load every explanation.
Retrospective notes
Prepare fewer stories and know a few real ones deeply. In the leadership rounds, expect team context to fall away fast so that your own decisions are what's left under the spotlight. For system design, think about how it runs in production and don't just draw boxes. Being clear matters more than being polished, and if you actually did the work, the story doesn't need heavy engineering.
The whole thing came across as a real conversation about how you operate as an engineering leader, not a scripted run through questions. What they seemed to want most was a match between what you claim and how you truly handled situations in the past.
Discussion
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