"Tell me about a specific time you had to raise or protect code quality on your team, especially when delivery pressure was high. What standards did you put in place, how did you get engineers to follow them, and what was the outcome? If relevant, you can use an example involving a Criteo surface such as Retail Media, Commerce Max, or a shared platform team."
This question is really about engineering leadership, not just coding hygiene. I want to understand how you define quality, how you balance speed versus long-term maintainability, and how you lead behavior change across a team rather than relying on heroic individual effort. For an Engineering Manager at Criteo, strong code quality practices matter because teams ship distributed systems and product capabilities that affect advertisers, retailers, and internal platform reliability at scale.
I’m also listening for how you handle resistance: for example, senior engineers who see process as friction, product pressure to ship faster, or ambiguity around what “good enough” means in different contexts.
A strong answer uses one concrete example, explains the business stakes, and shows the mechanisms you introduced—such as review standards, test gates, ownership models, incident learning, or mentoring. The best answers quantify the outcome, explain trade-offs, and include one thing you changed in your own approach after seeing what worked or didn’t.