These questions are orientated towards a software company which has a B2B software offering and are looking for a new Lead Engineer

Great article which is worth reading

Role Expectations

Lots of company’s have different internal expectations attached to the same role title.
It is important to get a firm understanding of the responsibilities and expectations for the particular role.

• Do I need to do budget planning?
• Am I expected to hire/fire people?
• How will you evaluate my success?
• What spurred the need for this role? What gaps are you hoping to fill / issues to fix?

Team Dynamics

• Can I meet the team?
• Can I meet with some of the stakeholders I will work with?
• What is the team churn rate? Any recent turbulence?
• How is the team’s morale? are they feeling good? are they anxious?

Company Road Map

Healthy companies should have well thought out road maps for where they are headed. I would expect there to be vision statements and Long term goals. Depending on how old/new the company, 6 months might be considered ‘long term’. I am mainly looking for a strong sense of direction.

• Is there a clear road map?
• How far in to the road map is the company currently?
• How often is it reevaluated?

How are features decided?

• Who is deciding what features are in or out?
• If someone disagrees or has a better idea - how is this handled? is it handled well?
• Are suggestions from the developers taken seriously? Are there examples of when this has happened?
• What is the process by which new ideas are introduced or prioritised?

Technical Questions - Code Health

This is a critical question if you are applying for a technical role in the development team. “How healthy is the code base?”

• Are there areas whether no one wants to work or make changes?
• How good is the unit test code coverage?
• Is there a good level of supporting documentation / training?
• How many distinct generations of systems are there? (Important for older companies)
• Are there area specialists on the team?
• Is the team following best practices regarding GIT branching + Code reviews

Technical Questions - Quality Assurance

• How are new features tested?
• Is there extensive regression testing required - or routinely done?
• Does the testing team have clear test plans?
• Do we have automated smoke testing?

Technical Questions - Deployment Routines

• Are deployments fully automated? OR semi automated i.e. ‘click a couple of buttons’?
• Do the individual teams have separate releases?
• How often are releases happening?

Technical Questions - Environments

• Are individual stories tested in isolation in their own environment?
• How easily can a new environment be created?
• Are we using containerised infrastructure?

Technical Questions - Databases

• How many databases / data stores do we have in production?
• Is there one big monolithic database?
• Do we many databases?

Technical Questions - Authentication

• Do we allow our B2B customers to bring there own authentication systems? i.e. Active Directory?

Product Questions

• How often are we building custom features for a specific customer?
• How is the product structured for the different clients
• Do we have separate environments per customer?

Technical Questions - Disaster Recovery

• Is the system capable of being recreated after a disaster?
• How confident are we in the backup/restore systems?