How to Hire Technical Managers
The process, interviews, and evaluation of technical managers
Slide contents
1. How to Hire Technical Managers
The process, interviews, and evaluation of technical managers
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. 01. Who are we hiring?
The engineering career path and the Teamlead's place in it
4. Teamlead sits between Senior and Engineering Manager
Leadership connects the engineering and management tracks
5. 02. How do we hire Teamleads?
The funnel, skills, and process scope
6. Seven stages, three of them are core
The Fit Interview sits between Management and the offer
7. Every skill has its own interview
The Teamlead competency hexagon
8. Teamleads are hired by the company process
Uniform requirements beat a precise fit to one team
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. 03. Management Interview
How the Teamlead section is structured
11. The management interview has six blocks
From work experience to candidate questions
12. 04. System Design Interview
From the problem statement to follow-up questions
13. Seven steps, from brief to follow-ups
Requirements → boundaries → flows → data → technologies
14. 05. How do we evaluate a candidate?
Three interview axes and five outcomes
15. Three axes lead to five outcomes
Junior, Middle and Senior are axis levels, not grades
16. 06. How do we hire Engineering Directors?
The funnel, evaluation axes, and hiring scope
17. After the Teamlead — Engineering Director
The same ladder, a different role circled
18. The Director funnel drops one interview
The Language Interview is removed; all other stages remain
19. All six axes change for a Director
Structure, functions, strategy and reasoning about change
20. Directors are hired into a specific team
Precise context matters more than process scalability
21. 07. Management Interview for Directors
STAR and Who structure real experience
22. STAR follows one situation to its outcome
23. Five questions follow a fixed chain
Who Interview, from “Who: Solve Your #1 Problem”
24. 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
25. Materials for further study