Slide contents

1. 1. How to Hire Technical Managers

   The process, interviews, and evaluation of technical managers

2. 2. What this talk covers

   From career path to the Director interview

   Who we hire: career path

   Teamlead hiring: funnel and skills

   Management and System Design interviews

   Directors: process, STAR, and Who

3. 3. 01. Who are we hiring?

   The engineering career path and the Teamlead's place in it

4. 4. Teamlead sits between Senior and Engineering Manager

   Leadership connects the engineering and management tracks

5. 5. 02. How do we hire Teamleads?

   The funnel, skills, and process scope

6. 6. Seven stages, three of them are core

   The Fit Interview sits between Management and the offer

7. 7. Six skills, each with its own interview

   The Teamlead competency hexagon

8. 8. Company-wide hiring wins for Teamleads

   Uniform requirements versus precise team fit

   Company-wide hiring

   Uniform requirements and predictable quality

   Scalable process

   Hard to maintain; heavy for candidates

   Team hiring

   Closer fit to team needs

   Simple and low-overhead

   Hard to scale; manager-dependent

9. 9. Scale makes the hiring process complicated

   Customers, products, ecosystem, growth, and decentralization

   30M+ customers and growing load

   Many products and integrations

   Teams become autonomous

   Leaders make and implement decisions

10. 10. 03. Management Interview

    How the Teamlead section is structured

11. 11. The management interview has six blocks

    From work experience to candidate questions

12. 12. 04. System Design Interview

    From the problem statement to follow-up questions

13. 13. Seven steps, from brief to follow-ups

    Requirements → boundaries → flows → data → technologies

14. 14. 05. How do we evaluate a candidate?

    Three interview axes and five outcomes

15. 15. Three axes lead to five outcomes

    Junior, Middle, and Senior are axis levels, not Teamlead grades

16. 16. 06. How do we hire Engineering Directors?

    The funnel, evaluation axes, and hiring scope

17. 17. The Director funnel drops one interview

    The Language Interview is removed; all other stages remain

18. 18. All six axes change for a Director

    Business & IT, structure, functions, people, strategy, and change

19. 19. Directors are hired into a specific team

    Precise context matters more than process scalability

    Company-wide hiring

    Uniform requirements and predictable quality

    Scalable process

    Hard to maintain; heavy for candidates

    Team hiring

    Closer fit to team needs

    Simple and low-overhead

    Hard to scale; manager-dependent

20. 20. 07. Management Interview for Directors

    STAR and Who structure real experience

21. 21. STAR follows one situation to its outcome

22. 22. Five questions follow a fixed chain

    Who Interview, from “Who: Solve Your #1 Problem”

23. 23. Hiring follows the scope of the role

    What changes from Teamlead to Engineering Director

    Teamlead connects Senior and EM

    Teamleads use company-wide hiring

    Directors are hired into teams

    Each competency has an interview

    STAR and Who structure experience

    The broader the role, the more specific the evaluation context

24. 24. Materials from the talk itself

    The Who Interview book and the speaker's link

    “Who: Solve Your #1 Problem”

    Book review — t.me/book_cube/955

25. 25. Thank you!

    tellmeabout.tech

    Talk recording: youtube.com/watch?v=PxwCg_4HjLk All slides and links — in the Telegram channel

    Alexander Polomodov, Technical Director & Fellow, T-Technologies

    @ai4sdlc