Preparing for an Engineering Manager interview at Pagerduty requires a structured approach that balances your technical leadership capabilities with your people management philosophy. You should be ready to discuss not only what you have delivered in your career, but how you led your teams to deliver it.

People Leadership – You must demonstrate a clear framework for coaching, career development, and performance management. Interviewers will look for evidence that you actively invest in your engineers' growth and can navigate difficult interpersonal dynamics.

Agile Delivery & Execution – Be prepared to explain your philosophy on software development lifecycles. You should be comfortable discussing sprint planning, velocity, backlog grooming, and how you collaborate with agile program managers to ship high-quality software predictably.

Operational Mindset – At Pagerduty, operational health is paramount. You need to show that you prioritize system reliability, understand the realities of on-call rotations, and know how to drive blameless post-mortems and continuous improvement after system failures.

Cultural Alignment & Collaboration – Pagerduty highly values its collaborative and inclusive culture. You will be evaluated on your ability to build trust across functional boundaries, communicate transparently, and foster a healthy, supportive team environment.

The interview process for an Engineering Manager at Pagerduty is thorough and highly focused on cultural fit, team collaboration, and management execution. The company takes great care to ensure that incoming managers align with their values of empathy, reliability, and continuous improvement.

The journey begins with an initial recruiter screening to discuss your background and high-level alignment with the role. This is followed by a deeper technical and management screen with the hiring manager. If you progress past these initial stages, you will enter a comprehensive on-site (or virtual on-site) loop. This loop typically features conversations with peer engineering managers, product partners, agile project managers, and direct reports.

A unique aspect of the Pagerduty process is its emphasis on informal and social evaluation. Historically, this has included structured team lunches or dinners with key stakeholders, including executive leadership like the CTO. These sessions are designed to assess your sociability, communication style, and overall fit within the team dynamics in a less formal setting.

The timeline above outlines the typical progression from your initial application to the final offer stage. Candidates should expect the process to take approximately three to four weeks, depending on scheduling availability. Use this timeline to pace your preparation, focusing heavily on leadership scenarios ahead of the intensive on-site loop.

People Leadership & Team Development

This evaluation area focuses on your ability to build, nurture, and sustain high-performing engineering teams. Pagerduty expects its managers to be empathetic leaders who can guide engineers through career transitions, manage diverse teams, and maintain a healthy work-life balance.

Be ready to go over:

• Career Pathing – How you help engineers set goals, identify growth opportunities, and progress through technical or management tracks.
• Performance Management – Your approach to delivering constructive feedback and managing both high performers and underperforming team members.
• Team Health & Burnout – Strategies for monitoring team stress levels, especially when handling demanding on-call rotations or aggressive delivery deadlines.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Scaling engineering organizations, managing remote or geographically distributed teams, and building diverse hiring pipelines.

Example scenarios:

• "Describe a time when you had to deliver difficult performance feedback to an engineer who believed they were performing well."
• "How have you managed a team through a period of organizational change or shifting business priorities?"

Agile Methodology & Project Delivery

This area evaluates how you organize your team's work to deliver value consistently and predictably. You will likely interview with Agile Project Managers or Scrum Masters who will assess your practical application of agile principles.

Be ready to go over:

• Process Optimization – How you tailer agile frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban) to match your team’s maturity and project complexity.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration – How you align with Product Management, Design, and Quality Engineering to define milestones and deliver features.
• Metrics & Velocity – Your use of data (e.g., burn-down charts, cycle time, throughput) to diagnose delivery bottlenecks and improve predictability.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Managing dependencies across multiple engineering teams and coordinating large-scale, multi-quarter technical initiatives.

Example scenarios:

• "Walk me through how you partner with a Product Manager to negotiate scope when technical constraints threaten a launch date."
• "How do you handle a situation where your team consistently misses their sprint commitments?"

Operational Excellence & On-Call Health

Given the nature of Pagerduty's business, engineering managers must possess a deep appreciation for system reliability and the human cost of maintaining highly available services.

Be ready to go over:

• Incident Management – Your experience coordinating technical incident response and communicating status updates to non-technical stakeholders.
• On-Call Culture – How you design, monitor, and optimize on-call shifts to minimize alert fatigue and ensure fair distribution of operational load.
• Blameless Post-Mortems – How you facilitate post-incident reviews to identify root causes and preventive actions without assigning blame.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Defining and tracking Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for your team's services.

Example scenarios:

• "How do you decide when to stop feature development to focus exclusively on resolving technical debt or improving system reliability?"
• "Describe how you handled an outage where the root cause was a mistake made by one of your direct reports."