At Qualtrics, the Engineering Manager role is a pivotal leadership position designed to drive the development of the world’s leading Experience Management (XM) platform. You are not just managing tasks; you are leading the teams that build high-scale, cloud-native, and data-intensive systems. These systems enable thousands of global enterprises to collect, analyze, and act on critical customer, employee, product, and brand feedback in real-time.

Your impact in this role spans across people development, technical strategy, and business execution. You will be responsible for fostering a high-performance engineering culture, mentoring software engineers, and collaborating closely with product management and design to deliver robust, secure, and scalable SaaS solutions. Whether your team is focused on advanced analytics, machine learning pipelines, or intuitive user interfaces, your leadership directly influences how organizations understand human experiences.

This role requires a unique balance of deep technical aptitude and empathetic leadership. Qualtrics operates in a fast-paced environment where customer obsession is at the core of every engineering decision. To succeed, you must be comfortable navigating ambiguity, driving operational excellence, and aligning your team's output with the broader strategic goals of the company.

The following questions are compiled from real interview experiences of candidates who have gone through the Engineering Manager loop at Qualtrics. While the exact questions may vary depending on the specific team and location, they represent the key themes and patterns you should prepare for.

People Management & Leadership

This category tests your ability to mentor, grow, and manage engineers, as well as how you handle team dynamics and conflicts.

• Tell me about a time you had to manage a low-performing engineer. What steps did you take, and what was the outcome?
• How do you approach career development and coaching for both junior and senior engineers on your team?

To succeed in the Qualtrics interviewing process, you must prepare to demonstrate a blend of technical leadership, execution capability, and deep cultural alignment. The interviewers are looking for managers who can inspire teams while remaining highly analytical and structured in their decision-making.

Role-Related Knowledge – You must be able to speak fluently about distributed systems, SaaS architecture, and modern engineering practices. While you may not face hands-on coding tests, you will be thoroughly evaluated on your technical aptitude and your ability to guide architectural discussions.

Problem-Solving & Analytical Ability – Be ready to tackle case studies and situational scenarios. Your interviewers will assess how you structure ambiguous problems, utilize data to make decisions, and manage complex project timelines under pressure.

People & Project Leadership – You must demonstrate a proven track record of growing engineering talent, managing performance, and fostering collaboration. Prepare detailed stories that highlight your coaching philosophy and your ability to deliver high-impact projects.

Cultural Alignment (TACOS) – This is perhaps the most critical preparation area. Qualtrics places immense value on its core principles. You must weave these values naturally into your behavioral responses, showing how you live them in your day-to-day management style.

The interview process for an Engineering Manager at Qualtrics is thorough and highly conversational, designed to evaluate both your practical management skills and your cultural fit. Candidates frequently describe the process as structured, friendly, and deeply focused on mutual discovery.

The loop typically consists of 4 to 6 stages, often coordinated across global offices depending on the location of the hiring team. While the process is rigorous, recruiters are highly communicative and often provide preparation materials to help you succeed. Be prepared to adapt to different timezones if you are interviewing with globally distributed teams.

The visual timeline above outlines the typical progression of the Qualtrics hiring loop. Candidates should use this to pace their preparation, focusing first on high-level behavioral storytelling before diving deep into technical strategy and situational case studies. Note that while the sequence is generally standard, the timeline can be expedited if you communicate competing deadlines to your recruiter.

People Management & Team Leadership

At Qualtrics, engineering managers are expected to be people-first leaders. You must demonstrate that you can build, motivate, and retain high-performing teams, particularly in a fast-paced and occasionally ambiguous environment.

Be ready to go over:

• Performance Management – How you set expectations, monitor progress, and handle underperformance constructively.
• Career Mentoring – Your framework for helping engineers grow from junior to senior levels and mapping their goals to business needs.
• Team Health & Culture – Strategies for maintaining high morale, preventing burnout, and fostering psychological safety.
• Advanced concepts – Managing remote or hybrid teams across multiple timezones, designing effective onboarding programs, and building highly inclusive engineering cultures.

Example scenarios:

• "Describe a time when you had to rebuild trust with a team that had recently gone through a difficult re-org."
• "How do you handle a situation where a top-performing engineer is causing friction within the team?"

Technical Aptitude & Strategy

While you will not typically be asked to solve LeetCode-style coding challenges, you must prove your technical credibility. You need to show that you can earn the respect of senior engineers and make sound technical decisions that align with long-term business goals.

Be ready to go over:

• System Architecture – High-level design of scalable distributed systems, microservices, and API design.
• Operational Excellence – Monitoring, alerting, CI/CD pipelines, and disaster recovery strategies.
• Technical Decision Making – How you evaluate build-versus-buy decisions and manage technical debt.
• Advanced concepts – Scaling data pipelines for real-time analytics, cost optimization in cloud-native environments, and implementing security best practices at scale.

Example scenarios:

• "Walk me through how you would transition a legacy monolithic application to a microservices architecture."
• "How do you evaluate and introduce a new technology or framework to your team's stack?"

Culture & TACOS Values

Cultural fit is not a checkbox at Qualtrics; it is often the deciding factor in the hiring loop. You must deeply understand and embody the TACOS values throughout every conversation.

Be ready to go over:

• Transparency – Communicating openly, sharing context, and admitting mistakes.
• All-In – Commitment to the team’s mission and taking ownership of outcomes.
• Customer Obsessed – Putting the customer experience at the center of engineering decisions.
• One Team – Collaborating selflessly across departments and breaking down silos.
• Scrappy – Being resourceful, prioritizing speed-to-value, and solving problems creatively.

Example scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you had to make a quick decision with highly incomplete data to unblock a customer."
• "Describe a situation where you prioritized the success of another team over your own team's immediate goals."

As an Engineering Manager at Qualtrics, you will lead a multidisciplinary team of software engineers, guiding them through the full software development lifecycle. Your primary responsibility is to ensure the successful delivery of high-quality software while maintaining a healthy, motivated, and highly collaborative team environment.

You will partner closely with Product Managers, UX Designers, and Technical Program Managers to define team roadmaps, translate business requirements into technical execution plans, and manage project delivery. You will also represent your team in broader engineering forums, contributing to overall architectural standards and engineering practices across the organization.

On a daily basis, you will conduct one-on-ones, facilitate agile ceremonies, unblock technical hurdles, and act as a buffer to protect your team’s focus. You will also be actively involved in hiring, onboarding, and scaling your organization to meet the growing demands of the Qualtrics customer base.

To be competitive for the Engineering Manager position, you should possess a strong blend of technical expertise and leadership experience.

• Must-have qualifications:

  • Prior experience (typically 3+ years) directly managing engineering teams in a professional software development environment.
  • Solid foundational experience as a software engineer, with deep understanding of distributed systems, cloud computing, and modern SaaS architectures.
  • Proven track record of delivering complex technical projects using Agile/Scrum methodologies.
  • Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical audiences.

• Nice-to-have qualifications:

  • Experience working with high-scale data analytics, machine learning, or natural language processing technologies.
  • Background in enterprise SaaS or experience-management software.
  • Prior experience managing globally distributed or remote-first engineering teams.