What is an Engineering Manager at Ericsson?

As an Engineering Manager at Ericsson, you are at the forefront of global connectivity. You will lead teams that build and maintain the critical infrastructure powering 5G networks, cloud-native telecom solutions, and IoT platforms worldwide. Your work directly impacts billions of users by ensuring that telecommunications networks are highly scalable, secure, and ultra-reliable.

This role requires a unique balance of deep technical understanding and exceptional people leadership. You will not only guide the architectural direction of complex network systems but also cultivate high-performing engineering teams. At Ericsson, engineering leaders are expected to navigate significant scale and complexity, driving innovation in areas like Radio Access Networks (RAN), core networks, and network automation.

Stepping into this position means taking ownership of both product delivery and team culture. You will collaborate closely with product managers, network architects, and global stakeholders to translate strategic business goals into technical execution. Expect a role that challenges you to think globally, act decisively, and foster a work environment where talented engineers can thrive and innovate.

Common Interview Questions

The questions below represent common themes from actual Ericsson interviews. They are not a checklist to memorize, but rather a guide to help you identify patterns in what interviewers care about most. Use these to practice structuring your responses using the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) method.

Leadership and People Management

This category tests your emotional intelligence, coaching ability, and how you build team culture.

• Tell me about a time you had to step in and resolve a conflict between two of your engineers.
• How do you approach one-on-ones, and how do you ensure they are valuable for your team members?
• Describe a situation where you had to lead a team through a significant organizational change or period of ambiguity.
• Walk me through your process for hiring senior engineering talent. What specific traits do you look for?
• Give an example of how you helped an engineer transition into a leadership role.

Technical and Architectural Vision

These questions assess your ability to guide technical decisions and ensure system reliability.

• Describe the most complex system architecture you have recently overseen. What were the key bottlenecks?
• How do you ensure your team maintains high coding standards and adequate test coverage?
• Tell me about a time you had to overrule a technical decision made by your team. Why did you do it, and how was it received?
• How do you balance the need to deliver new features quickly with the necessity of building scalable, reliable infrastructure?
• Explain how you handle incident management and post-mortems when a critical system fails in production.

Execution and Delivery

This area evaluates your operational rigor and how you manage cross-functional projects.

• Tell me about a time you failed to meet a critical project deadline. What went wrong, and what did you learn?
• How do you handle changing requirements from product managers midway through a sprint or development cycle?
• Give an example of a time you had to collaborate with a difficult stakeholder to get a project over the line.
• How do you measure the success and velocity of your engineering team?
• Describe a situation where you had to manage dependencies with another engineering team that had conflicting priorities.

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Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparing for the Engineering Manager interviews at Ericsson requires a holistic approach. Interviewers will look for a blend of technical acumen, leadership maturity, and alignment with the company's core values. You should structure your preparation around the following key evaluation criteria:

Technical Leadership and Domain Knowledge – You are expected to understand the complexities of modern software development, particularly in a telecommunications or cloud-native context. Interviewers will evaluate your ability to guide technical decisions, review system architectures, and ensure telecom-grade reliability and security. You can demonstrate strength here by discussing past projects where you successfully balanced technical debt with feature delivery.

People Management and Team Building – At Ericsson, leaders are measured by the strength of their teams. This criterion assesses how you hire, mentor, and retain top engineering talent. Be prepared to share concrete examples of how you have coached underperforming engineers, resolved team conflicts, and built an inclusive, high-trust engineering culture.

Execution and Delivery – This evaluates your ability to drive complex projects to completion across distributed, global teams. Interviewers want to see your proficiency in agile methodologies, cross-functional collaboration, and risk management. Strong candidates will clearly articulate how they define success metrics, manage stakeholder expectations, and keep teams aligned during ambiguous or high-pressure situations.

Culture Fit and Communication – Ericsson highly values professionalism, collaboration, and a global mindset. You will be evaluated on your communication clarity, your ability to influence without authority, and your resilience. Demonstrating a calm, structured approach to problem-solving will signal that you are a strong cultural fit for their leadership team.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for an Engineering Manager at Ericsson is thorough, highly professional, and typically spans three major stages. The company places a strong emphasis on getting to know you as both a leader and a technologist. While the difficulty is generally considered average to challenging, candidates consistently report a very positive, respectful interview experience where interviewers are highly engaged. All interviews are typically conducted online, reflecting the company's global and hybrid working model.

You will generally begin with an initial HR or recruiter screening to assess your baseline qualifications, compensation expectations, and cultural alignment. This is followed by a deep-dive interview with the Hiring Manager or a peer Engineering Director, focusing heavily on your leadership philosophy and past delivery experiences. The final stage often involves speaking with senior technical leadership, such as a VP of Engineering or the Head of the Tech Department, where the focus shifts to strategic vision, scaling operations, and complex behavioral scenarios.

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This visual timeline outlines the typical three-stage progression of the Ericsson interview process, moving from the initial HR screen through to the final leadership interviews. You should use this to pace your preparation, focusing first on high-level behavioral examples and gradually diving into deeper strategic and architectural narratives as you approach the final rounds. Keep in mind that while the steps are standard, the timeline between these stages can vary significantly by global region.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

To succeed in the Engineering Manager interviews, you must prove your competence across several core disciplines. Ericsson interviewers will probe deeply into your past experiences to predict your future performance.

People Leadership and Team Dynamics

Your ability to build and sustain a healthy engineering culture is paramount. Interviewers want to know that you can inspire engineers, handle interpersonal friction, and align individual career goals with company objectives. Strong performance in this area means providing specific, outcome-driven examples rather than relying on management clichés.

Be ready to go over:

• Performance Management – How you handle both high performers (growth plans) and low performers (PIPs, coaching).
• Conflict Resolution – Navigating disagreements between engineers or between engineering and product teams.
• Hiring and Retention – Strategies for identifying top talent and keeping them engaged in a competitive market.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Leading through organizational restructuring, managing globally distributed teams across multiple time zones, and scaling teams rapidly.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you had to manage out an underperforming engineer. What steps did you take?"
• "Describe a situation where your team faced significant burnout. How did you recognize it and resolve it?"
• "How do you ensure alignment and maintain culture in a remote or globally distributed team?"

Technical Strategy and Architecture

While you may not be writing code every day, you must possess the technical depth to earn the respect of your team and validate architectural decisions. Ericsson builds systems that require immense scale and high availability. Interviewers will assess whether you can guide teams toward robust, scalable solutions.

Be ready to go over:

• System Design Principles – Understanding microservices, cloud infrastructure, and highly available architectures.
• Technical Debt Management – Balancing the need for rapid feature delivery with long-term system health and stability.
• Quality and CI/CD – Ensuring rigorous testing, deployment pipelines, and operational excellence.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Specific telecom domain knowledge (5G core, RAN), network virtualization, and edge computing architectures.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk me through a complex technical migration your team owned. What were the risks, and how did you mitigate them?"
• "How do you resolve a disagreement between two senior engineers regarding a critical architectural decision?"
• "Describe your approach to balancing new feature development with paying down technical debt."

Project Execution and Stakeholder Management

An Engineering Manager must be a master of execution. You will be evaluated on your ability to deliver software predictably while managing the expectations of various stakeholders. Strong candidates demonstrate a data-driven approach to tracking progress and a proactive stance on risk management.

Be ready to go over:

• Agile Delivery – Tailoring agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban) to fit the specific needs of your team.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration – Working with Product Management, QA, and Operations to ensure smooth product rollouts.
• Risk Mitigation – Identifying project blockers early and communicating them effectively to leadership.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Managing vendor relationships, handling compliance/regulatory constraints in telecom, and budget management.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time a critical project was falling behind schedule. How did you communicate this to stakeholders and get the project back on track?"
• "How do you push back on product requirements when your engineering team is already at capacity?"
• "Give an example of how you measure engineering productivity and team health."

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Key Responsibilities

As an Engineering Manager at Ericsson, your day-to-day work revolves around empowering your team to deliver world-class telecom and cloud solutions. You will spend a significant portion of your time conducting one-on-ones, mentoring engineers, and removing blockers that hinder your team's productivity. You are the bridge between technical execution and business strategy, ensuring that your team understands the "why" behind their work.

Collaboration is a massive part of this role. You will constantly interact with Product Managers to refine roadmaps, with System Architects to validate technical designs, and with other Engineering Managers to manage cross-team dependencies. You will be responsible for leading agile ceremonies, tracking delivery metrics, and ensuring that quality standards are rigorously met before any code reaches production.

Additionally, you will drive continuous improvement initiatives within your organization. This might involve refining CI/CD pipelines, advocating for new testing frameworks, or restructuring team topologies to better align with value streams. Ultimately, your responsibility is to create an environment where high-quality software is delivered predictably, and where engineers feel valued and challenged.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be a competitive candidate for the Engineering Manager role at Ericsson, you must demonstrate a solid mix of technical background and proven leadership experience.

• Technical skills – A strong foundation in software engineering, ideally with experience in cloud-native architectures (Kubernetes, Docker), microservices, and modern CI/CD practices. Familiarity with high-availability distributed systems is critical.
• Experience level – Typically, candidates need 8+ years of overall software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years in a direct people-management role leading teams of 5 to 15 engineers.
• Soft skills – Exceptional communication skills, a high degree of emotional intelligence, and the ability to negotiate and influence stakeholders at all levels of the organization.
• Must-have skills – Proven track record of delivering complex software projects, experience with agile methodologies, and strong conflict resolution abilities.
• Nice-to-have skills – Background in telecommunications, 5G networks, or IoT platforms. Experience managing globally distributed or remote-first teams.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How difficult are the interviews for an Engineering Manager at Ericsson? The difficulty is generally considered average to challenging. The technical questions are usually high-level architectural discussions rather than hands-on coding, but the behavioral and leadership evaluations are rigorous. The interviewers are known to be highly professional and respectful.

Q: How long does the interview process typically take? The timeline can vary significantly. While some candidates move through the process in a few weeks, others report waiting a month or two between stages, particularly when scheduling with senior leadership or the CEO of the tech department. Patience is essential.

Q: Are the interviews conducted in person or online? Currently, the vast majority of Ericsson interviews, including final rounds, are conducted entirely online via video conferencing. Ensure your remote setup is professional, quiet, and reliable.

Q: What differentiates a successful candidate from an average one? Successful candidates clearly articulate the impact of their leadership. They don't just say they managed a team; they provide metrics on how they improved delivery speed, reduced attrition, or successfully scaled a system. They also show a deep appreciation for telecom-grade reliability.

Q: Does Ericsson require deep telecommunications knowledge for this role? While prior telecom experience (like 5G or RAN) is a strong advantage, it is not always a strict requirement. Strong engineering fundamentals, experience with highly scalable distributed systems, and excellent leadership skills often outweigh highly specific domain knowledge.

Other General Tips

• Master the STAR Method: Ericsson interviewers expect structured, evidence-based answers. Always frame your behavioral responses with a clear Situation, Task, Action, and Result. Focus heavily on the "Action" (what you specifically did) and the "Result" (quantifiable outcomes).
• Emphasize Professionalism: Candidates consistently note the high level of professionalism in Ericsson interviews. Mirror this tone. Be concise, respectful, and composed, especially when discussing past failures or difficult colleagues.

• Prepare for the Global Context: Ericsson is a massive, globally distributed company. Highlight any experience you have working across different time zones, cultures, or international teams, as this is a highly valued trait for their managers.
• Patience is Key: Do not be discouraged if weeks pass without an update. The hiring apparatus at large telecommunications companies can be slow. Use the downtime to refine your architectural narratives and follow up politely with your recruiter.

Summary & Next Steps

Securing an Engineering Manager role at Ericsson is a significant career milestone. You will be joining a legacy of engineering excellence and leading teams that build the backbone of modern global communications. The scale of the problems you will solve here is immense, making it an incredibly rewarding environment for ambitious technical leaders.

To succeed, focus your preparation on your leadership narrative. Be ready to prove that you can build resilient teams, guide complex technical architectures, and deliver critical projects under pressure. Remember that Ericsson is looking for professionals who are not only technically sound but who also possess the emotional intelligence to inspire and lead.

The compensation data above provides a baseline for what you can expect in terms of base salary and total compensation for management roles at Ericsson. Keep in mind that exact figures will vary based on your specific location, your years of experience, and the strategic importance of the team you are joining.

Approach these interviews with confidence and structure. Your past experiences have prepared you for this challenge; your goal now is simply to communicate those experiences clearly and effectively. For more insights, practice scenarios, and detailed breakdowns of interview questions, continue exploring the resources available on Dataford. Good luck—you have the potential to make a massive impact.