Sample Answer
Include a couple of leadership-leaning technical prompts among the seven. Backend roles often require collaborating across teams and mentoring juniors, so I like at least two prompts that probe code review communication, incident postmortems, and mentoring approaches. In one hiring cycle I added a prompt about resolving a cross-team API compatibility dispute; candidates who described concrete steps—scheduled sync, agreed migration plan, feature flags—were 3x more likely to lead projects successfully in our org. Behavioral prompts also reveal cultural fit and communication style, which code-only questions won't. Keep the mix: four pure technical/problem prompts and three that surface leadership and collaboration.
Keywords
On your resume you mention working on a cross-functional project (e.g., involving multiple teams or stakeholders). Describe a situation from that project where priorities conflicted—how did you navigate the trade-offs and what was the final outcome?
Walk me through a recent multi-channel digital marketing campaign you managed end-to-end. How did you set objectives, choose channels, allocate budget, and measure success?
In your resume you note improving or optimizing [a process, KPI, or metric]. What specific baseline metrics did you start from, what steps did you personally take, and how did you verify that the improvement was due to your changes rather than external factors?
In your civil engineering studies, what specific design coursework or project work did you complete related to irrigation channels or canals (e.g., design of lined/unlined canals, distributaries, minors)? Describe one such design in detail, including how you determined discharge, permissible velocity, section dimensions, and lining choice for Gujarat-type soil and climate conditions.
Based on your hydrology and irrigation engineering background, explain how you would estimate the irrigation water requirement for a kharif crop in a semi-arid region of Gujarat. Walk me through each step: from reference evapotranspiration estimation, crop coefficient selection, effective rainfall calculation, to arriving at canal discharge for a given command area.