Behavioral

Pick a real disagreement with a peer (not a personality clash), tell it in STAR, and emphasize: you listened first, you separated the problem from the person, you used facts/prototypes to decide, and you reached an outcome that served the team. End with a concrete result and a lesson.

Show you use AI tools (Copilot, ChatGPT/Claude, Cursor) as a productivity multiplier while staying the engineer in charge: faster boilerplate/tests/refactors, but you review every line, never paste secrets or proprietary code into public tools, verify correctness and security, and own the output. The red flag is either dismissing AI entirely or trusting it blindly.

Tell it in STAR with an incident-response spine: stop the bleeding first (rollback / feature flag / hotfix), communicate early and often to stakeholders, find root cause with data (logs, error tracking, the diff), then fix forward and add a regression test + monitoring so it can't recur. Show calm, ownership, and a blameless postmortem mindset.

Cross-team communication is about reducing ambiguity and dependencies: agree on explicit contracts (API schemas, interfaces) early, over-communicate status and changes, use written artifacts (docs, RFCs) as the source of truth, identify and unblock dependencies proactively, and translate your concerns into the other team's language. Bring a STAR example of aligning two teams.

Be ready to go several layers deep on a real project: the problem and your role, the architecture and why, your SDLC (branching, reviews, CI/CD, testing), how you debug production issues (error tracking, logs, repro, rollback), and your observability (metrics, alerts, RUM). Pick a project you know cold and can defend every decision on.

Pick a story where you saw a gap nobody owned, took initiative without being asked, and drove it to a result — while keeping stakeholders informed (initiative, not going rogue). Emphasize the gap you spotted, the action you took, the outcome, and that you brought others along rather than working in a silo.

Frame it around shared goals (user value, business outcome) rather than 'engineering vs. design'. Understand their constraints first, bring data or a quick prototype, present trade-offs not vetoes, and be willing to disagree-and-commit. Show you respect that PMs own priorities and designers own UX — your job is to make the trade-offs visible.

Show a process: clarify the real must-haves vs. nice-to-haves, negotiate scope (not quality) early, break work into shippable increments, communicate risk to stakeholders before it's a crisis, and protect the non-negotiables (correctness, security, accessibility). End with a STAR example where scoping — not heroics — saved the deadline.

Don't start coding — reduce ambiguity first: ask clarifying questions, restate your understanding back, identify the user problem behind the feature request, and surface assumptions explicitly. Then de-risk with a quick prototype/wireframe to get concrete feedback, and ship iteratively so reality corrects the spec. Show you're comfortable driving clarity, not waiting for it.

Use the STAR format: Situation (context), Task (what you were responsible for), Action (what *you* specifically did — focus on listening, data, and finding shared goals), Result (the outcome, ideally quantified + what you learned). For conflict, show you depersonalize the disagreement, seek to understand the other side, and resolve it with facts, not authority.

This is a theme, not one question — prepare a small bank of STAR stories that each demonstrate leadership (driving a decision/initiative), ownership (closing a gap, seeing something through), or teamwork (unblocking others, mentoring, collaborating). Map your real experiences to these themes ahead of time so you can answer any phrasing.

Be specific and genuine: connect the company's product/mission/tech/scale to your own goals and strengths. Show you researched them (recent work, engineering blog, the actual product). Avoid generic flattery and avoid making it only about comp or perks. Frame it as a two-way fit — what excites you AND what you'd contribute.

Use STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result). Bias toward your specific actions, quantify outcomes, and be honest about tradeoffs. Have 4–6 stories prepped that you can flex across most behavioral prompts.

Same playbook for both: understand their constraint first, translate your concern into their terms (UX cost for designers, contract/latency for backend), bring a prototype or data, present options instead of a veto, and disagree-and-commit on reversible calls. The goal is the best outcome for the user, not winning the argument.

A prep strategy (common for Amazon-style loops): build a matrix of ~10-15 STAR stories that collectively cover each Leadership Principle, with strong stories covering 2-3 LPs each. Write them out, quantify results, practice to 90 seconds, include failure stories, and always use 'I'. The goal is coverage and recall under pressure, not memorized scripts.

Same as the critical-production-bug question: STAR with an incident spine — mitigate first (rollback/flag/hotfix), communicate early, diagnose with error tracking and the recent diff, fix forward, then add a regression test, monitoring, and a blameless postmortem so it can't recur.

STAR answer: a real feature with a hard date. Emphasize how you scoped down to must-haves, sliced into shippable increments behind a flag, communicated risk early, and protected non-negotiables. The result should show you hit the date without quietly sacrificing quality.

Use STAR. Lead with the metric (LCP went from 4.8s → 1.6s p75). Walk the bottleneck identification, the trade-offs, the rollout, and what you'd do differently.

Frame growth in three vectors: depth (technical mastery — performance, architecture, a domain), breadth (adjacent skills — product, design, infra), and impact (scope — from features to systems to teams). Pick one or two; tie to what you've already started doing; avoid 'I want to be a manager' if that's not actually the role you're applying to.