As an Engineering Manager at Akido, you are at the forefront of building technology that addresses massive challenges in public health, social services, and healthcare data interoperability. This role is not just about managing tickets; it is about driving the technical vision and empowering a team of engineers to build robust, scalable systems that directly impact vulnerable populations and community health networks.

Your impact spans across product delivery, architectural strategy, and team culture. You will guide engineers through complex technical trade-offs while ensuring that Akido maintains high standards for data security, compliance, and system reliability. Because our platforms handle sensitive, high-volume healthcare data, the technical decisions you oversee carry significant weight.

Expect to operate in a highly dynamic environment where ambiguity is common and strategic execution is critical. You will partner closely with product managers, operations, and cross-functional leaders to translate high-level business requirements into actionable engineering roadmaps. At Akido, this role is designed for leaders who are as passionate about mentoring people as they are about elegant system design.

The following questions represent the types of inquiries candidates frequently encounter during the Akido interview process. While you should not memorize answers, use these to identify patterns in what the hiring team values and how they evaluate your experience.

Technical Strategy & System Design

This category tests your ability to guide technical direction and architect robust systems.

• How would you design a highly available API that interfaces with legacy healthcare systems?
• Tell me about a time you had to advocate for paying down technical debt over building new features.

Preparing for the Engineering Manager interview requires a balanced focus on technical aptitude, leadership philosophy, and execution capability. Your interviewers want to see how you think, how you lead, and how you deliver.

Technical Leadership – You must demonstrate a strong foundation in software engineering and system design. Interviewers will evaluate your ability to guide architectural discussions, review code patterns, and ensure technical excellence without necessarily writing the code yourself.

People Management – We look for managers who can build, scale, and mentor high-performing teams. You will be evaluated on your approach to conflict resolution, performance management, and career development for your direct reports.

Execution and Delivery – This measures your ability to turn strategy into shipped software. You can demonstrate strength here by discussing how you manage agile processes, handle shifting priorities, and balance technical debt with feature delivery.

Culture and Values – Akido values transparency, resilience, and mission-driven focus. Interviewers will assess your ability to navigate ambiguity, communicate openly, and foster an inclusive, collaborative team environment.

The interview process for an Engineering Manager at Akido is designed to be thorough and typically takes about one month from the initial screen to the final decision. Our recruiting team prides itself on high communication, clearly outlining next steps, and working with your schedule—especially if you are balancing competing offers.

You will begin with a recruiter screen to align on experience and expectations, followed by a deeper conversation with a hiring manager. A defining feature of the Akido process is the technical take-home assignment. This "homework" is known to be rigorous and comprehensive, designed to simulate the actual technical and architectural challenges you will face on the job.

Following the take-home assignment, you will participate in a virtual or onsite panel loop. This final stage involves defending your take-home project, participating in system design discussions, and answering deep-dive behavioral questions with cross-functional leaders and engineering peers.

This visual timeline breaks down the typical stages of your interview journey, highlighting the progression from initial screening to the take-home project and final panel. Use this to pace your preparation, ensuring you allocate sufficient time and energy for the intensive take-home assignment, which is a major gating factor in the process.

System Design and Architecture

As an Engineering Manager, you are expected to be the technical backstop for your team. This area evaluates your ability to design scalable, secure, and highly available systems, which is critical given the healthcare data Akido processes. You will need to demonstrate that you can weigh trade-offs between different architectural approaches.

Be ready to go over:

• Data processing pipelines – Designing systems that securely ingest, transform, and route large volumes of sensitive data.
• Microservices vs. Monoliths – Knowing when to decouple services and how to manage inter-service communication and eventual consistency.
• Database selection – Choosing the right storage solutions (SQL vs. NoSQL) based on read/write patterns and compliance requirements.
• Advanced concepts (less common) –
  • Real-time stream processing architectures.
  • Advanced caching strategies for high-latency third-party APIs.
  • HIPAA-compliant infrastructure design.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Design a system to securely ingest and standardize patient records from multiple disparate hospital networks."
• "How would you architect a notification service that alerts healthcare providers of critical patient events in real-time?"
• "Walk me through a time you had to pivot your team's architectural strategy due to scaling bottlenecks."

People Management and Team Building

Your ability to grow and support engineers is just as important as your technical acumen. Akido looks for leaders who lead with empathy, set clear expectations, and actively manage both high and low performers.

Be ready to go over:

• Performance management – Identifying underperformance early and structuring actionable improvement plans.
• Career development – Helping engineers level up from junior to mid-level, or mid-level to senior, through deliberate project assignment.
• Hiring and onboarding – Strategies for identifying top talent and getting them productive quickly in a complex domain.
• Advanced concepts (less common) –
  • Managing out toxic high-performers.
  • Rebuilding morale in a team that has experienced high turnover.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you had to manage out an underperforming engineer. How did you handle the process?"
• "How do you align an engineer's personal career goals with the immediate delivery needs of the business?"
• "Describe your process for resolving a deep technical disagreement between two senior engineers on your team."

Project Execution and The Take-Home Assignment

Because Akido utilizes a comprehensive take-home assignment, your ability to execute, document, and defend your work is heavily scrutinized. This area tests your hands-on technical baseline and your ability to communicate complex ideas clearly.

Be ready to go over:

• Code quality and structure – Writing clean, maintainable, and well-tested code for your assignment.
• Technical documentation – Explaining your design decisions, assumptions, and future scaling considerations in a clear README.
• Project defense – Confidently answering questions about why you chose specific libraries, patterns, or data models during the panel review.
• Advanced concepts (less common) –
  • Identifying the specific security vulnerabilities in your own take-home submission.
  • Proposing a CI/CD pipeline for the project you built.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk us through the architecture of your take-home submission. What trade-offs did you make to complete it within the timeframe?"
• "If we needed to scale your submitted project to handle 100x the traffic, what components would break first, and how would you fix them?"
• "How do you balance the need for technical excellence with the reality of tight product deadlines?"

As an Engineering Manager at Akido, your day-to-day involves a seamless blend of strategic planning, team mentorship, and cross-functional collaboration. You will lead a squad of engineers, taking ownership of their delivery pipeline, code quality, and overall well-being. This requires daily check-ins, weekly 1-on-1s, and active participation in agile ceremonies to ensure blockers are removed swiftly.

You will collaborate heavily with Product Managers to define roadmaps, estimate engineering effort, and push back when technical debt needs to be addressed. Rather than taking top-down orders, you are expected to be a strategic partner who helps shape what is built and how it is built. You will also interface with operations and compliance teams to ensure all features meet stringent data security standards.

Additionally, you will spend a significant portion of your time recruiting, interviewing, and refining the hiring process. Building the team is a continuous responsibility. You will drive initiatives that improve engineering culture, such as implementing new CI/CD practices, establishing better incident response protocols, and fostering an environment of continuous learning.

To be competitive for the Engineering Manager role at Akido, you need a solid foundation in both software engineering and people leadership. We look for candidates who have transitioned from strong individual contributors into capable managers.

• Must-have skills –
  • 5+ years of software engineering experience building complex, data-heavy applications.
  • 2+ years of direct engineering management experience, including conducting 1-on-1s and performance reviews.
  • Deep understanding of modern cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), API design, and scalable system architecture.
  • Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional communication skills.
• Nice-to-have skills –
  • Previous experience in health tech, public health data, or highly regulated environments (HIPAA compliance).
  • Experience scaling engineering teams at a fast-growing startup.
  • Familiarity with the specific tech stack currently utilized by Akido (e.g., Node.js, React, PostgreSQL).