Preparing for an Engineering Manager interview at Handshake requires a balanced approach. You cannot rely solely on your past management experience or your coding skills; instead, you must demonstrate how these two domains interact to produce high-performing engineering teams.

People Leadership & Mentorship – Handshake looks for leaders who lead with empathy and a growth mindset. You should be prepared to discuss your management philosophy, how you build trust with your direct reports, and how you foster an inclusive environment. Be ready to share concrete stories of how you have coached engineers to promotions or navigated difficult performance conversations.

System Architecture & Technical Depth – Even as a manager, your technical skills will be thoroughly evaluated. You must show that you can still engage in deep technical discussions, guide architectural choices, and ask the right questions during system design reviews. Focus on demonstrating a structured approach to scaling, data modeling, and system reliability.

Product Sense & Execution – Great engineering managers at Handshake are also strong product partners. You need to show that you care about the "why" behind the product, not just the "how." Be prepared to talk about how you align your team's technical roadmap with user needs and business metrics.

Cultural Alignment & Empathy – As a company dedicated to helping students find jobs, empathy is a core value at Handshake. Interviewers will evaluate how you treat candidates, how you support your team, and how you align with the company's mission to democratize opportunity.

The interview process for an Engineering Manager at Handshake is thorough and designed to evaluate you across multiple dimensions, including technical capability, leadership style, product collaboration, and cultural alignment. Candidates typically describe the process as fair, highly structured, and representative of the actual day-to-day responsibilities of the role.

The journey begins with an initial recruiter screen focused on your background, career goals, and alignment with Handshake values. This is followed by a hiring manager screen—often with an Engineering Director—to dive deeper into your leadership experience. You will then undergo a technical screening, which usually consists of a high-level technical discussion or a practical coding and systems-focused exercise with a senior engineer.

The final stage is a comprehensive onsite or virtual full-day loop. This loop is highly cross-functional, reflecting the collaborative culture of the company. You will meet with potential future direct reports, peer engineering managers, product managers, and engineering executives. The day is divided into dedicated modules covering systems design, management style, product collaboration, and cultural fit.

The timeline above outlines the typical stages a candidate navigates from the initial application to the final offer. While the overall loop is highly structured, the scheduling and coordination can sometimes vary depending on team availability and logistics. Candidates should use this timeline to pace their preparation, ensuring they dedicate equal time to technical architecture and behavioral leadership scenarios.

To succeed in the Handshake interview loop, you must understand exactly what interviewers are looking for in each core segment. Below is a detailed breakdown of the primary evaluation areas.

System Design & Architecture

This session evaluates your ability to design robust, scalable, and maintainable systems. Interviewers want to see how you approach ambiguity, gather requirements, and make pragmatic architectural trade-offs.

Be ready to go over:

• Marketplace Dynamics – Understanding how to architect systems that connect multiple user types (students, employers, and universities) and handle complex data relationships.
• Data Modeling & Storage – Choosing the right databases (relational vs. non-relational) for specific workloads and designing efficient schemas.
• Scalability & Reliability – Designing systems that scale horizontally, handle traffic spikes during peak recruiting seasons, and degrade gracefully under load.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Real-time event streaming (e.g., Kafka), search indexing infrastructure (e.g., Elasticsearch), and microservices orchestration.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Design a backend service that handles job recommendations for students based on their profile, major, and search history."
• "How would you design a rate-limiting service to protect our public-facing APIs from abuse while ensuring legitimate partner universities maintain access?"
• "Walk us through how you would architect a messaging system that allows employers to securely message students, ensuring privacy controls and spam detection are built-in."

People Management & Team Leadership

This area focuses on your ability to build, scale, and lead engineering teams. Handshake values leaders who can cultivate a healthy, inclusive, and high-performing team culture.

Be ready to go over:

• Performance Management – How you set clear expectations, deliver constructive feedback, and handle underperformance.
• Career Growth & Mentorship – Your framework for helping engineers grow from junior to senior levels and mapping their goals to business needs.
• Team Health & Culture – How you foster psychological safety, manage remote or hybrid team dynamics, and build a diverse and inclusive environment.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Handling organizational changes, restructuring teams, and managing managers (for higher-level EM roles).

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time when a high-performing engineer on your team was exhibiting toxic behavior. How did you handle it?"
• "How do you approach building a hiring pipeline that ensures diversity and inclusion, and how do you evaluate candidates for team fit?"
• "Describe a situation where your team was falling behind on a critical deadline. What interventions did you make to get them back on track?"

Product Collaboration & Execution

Engineering managers at Handshake are expected to be strong business partners. This interview evaluates how you work with product management to deliver maximum value to users.

Be ready to go over:

• Roadmap Prioritization – Balancing feature requests, technical debt, and infrastructure investments.
• Cross-functional Communication – Translating complex technical constraints into business risks and opportunities for non-technical stakeholders.
• Agile Execution – Your preferred project management methodologies and how you ensure predictable, high-quality delivery.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "How do you handle a situation where a product manager wants to push a feature to production, but your team feels the architecture is too unstable?"
• "Describe how you have used data and metrics to influence a product roadmap or pivot a team's technical direction."
• "What is your process for conducting post-mortems after a production incident, and how do you ensure the learnings are shared across the organization?"

As an Engineering Manager at Handshake, your day-to-day responsibilities will bridge the gap between technical strategy and people operations. You will be directly responsible for the health, happiness, and output of an engineering team.

Your primary responsibilities will include:

• Leading a team of 5 to 10 software engineers, providing regular 1:1 coaching, career guidance, and performance feedback.
• Partnering closely with Product Managers and Product Designers to define your team's strategy, roadmap, and execution plans.
• Ensuring the technical quality, reliability, and security of the services and features your team owns.
• Actively participating in system design reviews, helping your team make smart architectural choices that align with the company's long-term technology strategy.
• Driving engineering recruiting efforts, including interviewing, hiring, and onboarding top-tier diverse talent to scale your team.
• Fostering an inclusive, collaborative, and high-performance team environment where engineers feel empowered to do their best work.

Ultimately, you will be responsible for ensuring your team executes predictably, delivers high business value, and continuously improves their technical craft.