Questions to ask in interviews

Interview is a two-ways street: it enables the future employer to know more about your likelihood to fit into the team; but it is also for you the best opportunity to know more about your future management-style, team and colleagues. It is a rare chance to develop a feeling for the company before you accept (or reject) the job offer. It might either confirm or quash your initial beliefs. Last but not the least, it is also a way for you to give a very nice first impression. Your aim is to show that you are already projecting yourself into the job, striving to be a technical asset and social enabler for those you gonna work with.

Note: if you are looking for red-flags, you will always find some. Sometimes, ignoring what you think might be off is a good strategy. For me, receiving the job offer very shortly after the second interviews (less than a few days) always felt a bit weird but more often led to very pleasant experiences. Of course, there is no way to tell wether or not you have dodged the bullet until you have waited long enough for the trigger to be pulled. The evaluation period is also a way for you to test the water. In the rare occasions where should the trial period be a bummer, you can always resume it. Turn the associated perks to your own benefit and do use it!

Straight to the point, hereafter the questions. Feel free to take from it:

1. What your typical day is looking like? What are the key milestones of your days and weeks?

2. What are the main technical and managerial challenges you are currently facing with? What are the solutions your are walking forward?

3. How the team stays in tune with the current and emerging technologies?

4. What the onboarding journey will look like? What are the learning paths or processes in place? What is your mentoring process?

5. Before taking any final decision, would it be possible for me to meet the whole team and the manager?

6. When could I start?

7. What can I do to surpass your expectations and be a positive element of your team and organization?

8. What degree of initiatives one can have within the team? How are you enabling the teams to be self-directed and proactivity?

9. What is your technical stack? What are the provided working devices? What kind of access rights do people have on their equipments?

10. What technical debts do you have? How are you coping with it?

11. How do you bring the team together? What are the biggest concerns shared across the team at the moment?

12. Who are your main stakeholders?

13. What is the vision the team is striving for? How the team is stirring toward those goals?

14. How are you making sure you are keeping track with the road map?

15. How are you coping with errors and mistakes to occur?

16. Are there any career milestones and evolution pathways already in place? What the perspectives would look like?

17. How the scopes, milestones, timelines and deliveries of a project are estimated?

18. How are you disambiguating ambiguous problem statements to get to the root of problems, incoming requests and situations?

19. What amount of details should I provide to the manager for him to stay in the loop without drawing him in unnecessary information? What is the satisfactory update frequency one should adopt?

20. Where do you draw the line, finding the good balance between action and delivery but without over-compromising on quality?

21. How is your code, legacy and processes documented? What is your estimated coverage?

22. What are the standards and best practices you have in place to guarantee good codebase quality? How to ensure the reliability of your data pipelines?

23. Regarding Git and Gitlab, what are your main CI pipelines jobs consist of?

24. What is your home-office policy? What actions are in place to stimulate the “working together” sentiment?

25. Beside my mother tongue, I do speak english at a very proficient level. I however ensure to speak german – which I consistently learn since two years with the objective of being perfectly fluent by 2025 – on a minimum daily base. I can so far hold causal conversations. I intend to adopt the mean of communication the team is the most comfortable with. Should it be german, what would you expect from me to ease my integration within the team, quickly close any cultural gaps that might be and promote effective cooperations?

26. Which data stage are you? E.g. Monolithic on-premises systems or moved already on the Cloud. Reverse ETL in place? What are your observability and DataOps (DevOps and FinOps) strategies?

27. Is there an explicit agreement (SLA/SLO) between the upstream data source teams and the data engineering team?

28. Who are your upstream and downstream stakeholders?

29. How is the data architects/data engineering tandem working? How involved are each parties in the decision-making process?

30. Is the workloads internal-facing (upright stream from source systems to analytics and ML teams) or external-facing (feedback-loop from the application to the data-pipeline)?

Note: those questions have a purpose. On top of providing useful information for you to make your choice, they are matching the inquiries any Senior Data Engineer might have. Proving at the same time that you have already owned your way in the Senior team. And if you have already those concerns in mind, congratulations, you are a Senior Data Engineer! 🥳

See also: Are you a Senior Data Engineer?