Behavioral: How You Use AI, Lead Engineers, and Work with Another Team or PM

This behavioral segment takes about the first 25 minutes of a one-hour technical phone screen for a software engineering role; the rest of the hour is a coding exercise and a few minutes for your own questions. The interviewer asks three questions in turn, which leaves roughly eight minutes for each answer and its follow-up probes. Answer each with a specific example from your own work. ### Clarifying Questions - For the first question, should you talk about how you use AI tools in your day-to-day engineering, about AI features you have built into a product, or both? - For the leadership question, does leading without a formal title count, for example being the technical owner of a project that other engineers contributed to? - For the third question, is a project with another engineering team as useful as one with a product manager, or does the interviewer want the PM relationship specifically? ### Part 1 — How you use AI How do you use AI in your work? ```hint Show judgment, not enthusiasm Pick two or three concrete workflows, and be ready to say where you do not trust the output and how you check it before it ships. ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - Specific tasks where AI helps, and the tasks deliberately kept away from it - How generated output is verified before it reaches production - A concrete effect on speed or quality, and a limitation or mistake that changed the practice ### Part 2 — Leading other engineers on a project Tell me about a project where you led other engineers. ```hint Leadership is what changed for others Choose a story in which your actions changed how other engineers worked: how the work was split, how a technical disagreement was settled, or how someone was unblocked. ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - Scope, team size, and your role relative to the other engineers - How you set technical direction, divided the work and tracked progress - A conflict, risk or slipping piece of work you handled, and the outcome for the project and the people ### Part 3 — Working with another team or a PM Tell me about a project you did with another team or with a product manager. ```hint Make the friction real The strongest stories include a real disagreement about scope, priority, timeline or an interface, and show how you resolved it. ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - Each side's goals and where they conflicted - How requirements, interfaces and dates were agreed and kept in sync - The result, and what you would change about working across that boundary ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A clear STAR structure in each story, with your own actions separated from the team's - Outcomes stated with numbers or observable results rather than adjectives - Three distinct examples, or clearly different angles if one project recurs - Self-awareness: a mistake, trade-off or lesson in at least one story - Pacing that fits all three answers into about 25 minutes ### Follow-up Questions - Describe a time an AI tool gave you a confident but wrong answer. How did you catch it? - In the leadership story, what would the other engineers say you could have done better? - In the cross-team story, what happened when requirements changed late, and who made the call? - How do you decide which code or data may be shared with an AI tool?