Engineering Manager

Credible resume terms

Terms that should plausibly appear on a real Engineering Manager resume. “Must-have” marks the ones whose total absence is a genuine red flag.

• Engineering Manager

  A people manager for a team of engineers, often five to ten: hiring, one-to-ones, performance reviews, growing people and making sure the team delivers.

• AgileMust-have

  An approach to building software in small, iterative chunks with frequent feedback, instead of planning the whole project upfront.

• Scrum

  A specific flavor of Agile with fixed-length sprints, defined roles (Scrum Master, Product Owner), and set ceremonies like standups and retros.

• Sprint Planning

  A meeting at the start of a sprint where the team decides what work to commit to for that sprint, based on priority and how much capacity they realistically have.

• OKRs

  A goal-setting framework: a qualitative Objective paired with measurable Key Results used to track progress toward it.

• Technical Debt

  Shortcuts or quick fixes taken to ship faster, which create extra work later.

• DORA Metrics

  Four research-backed measures of delivery performance: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service.

• Incident Response

  The structured process a team follows when something breaks in production — detecting, communicating, mitigating, and resolving the issue.

• Postmortem

  A written review conducted after an incident to understand what went wrong and prevent it from recurring, ideally 'blameless' — focused on the system and process, not blaming an individual.

• System DesignMust-have

  The practice of planning how a software system's components fit together to meet requirements like scale, reliability, and performance — a common senior-level interview topic.

• Code ReviewMust-have

  The practice of having other engineers read and comment on code changes before they're merged, to catch bugs and share knowledge.

• Design Docs / RFCs / ADRs

  Short written documents engineers circulate before building something significant: the problem, the options considered, the chosen approach and its risks.

Engineering Manager: screening questions

One question per core skill, must-haves first. Each term’s page shows what a junior and a senior answer sound like.

1. System Design

   “Walk me through a system you designed from scratch. What was the hardest tradeoff you had to make?”

2. Agile

   “What did your team actually do day-to-day that made it 'Agile,' versus just having a backlog?”

3. Code Review

   “Tell me about a time a code review changed your approach, or you pushed back on one.”

4. DORA Metrics

   “Which of the four was worst for your team, and what did you change?”

5. Incident Response

   “Tell me about the worst incident you were part of. What was your specific role in resolving it?”

Adjacent, but not real signal

These read as related, but they don’t tell you this candidate can do this job — they usually belong to one of the roles below.

• Scrum Master

  Facilitates a Scrum team's process — runs the ceremonies, removes blockers, and protects the team from interruption.

• Technical Program Manager

  Runs large technical programmes that span several teams — tracking dependencies, unblocking, and keeping everyone honest about dates, without owning the engineers.

• Jira

  The most widely used project-tracking tool for Agile teams — sprint boards, backlogs, and issue tracking — from Atlassian.

Most often confused with

• Tech Lead

  The senior engineer accountable for a team's technical direction: designs the system, sets coding standards, reviews code, unblocks others and still writes a good share of the code. Usually has no direct reports, which is where it differs from an Engineering Manager.

• Technical Program Manager

Engineering Manager: search strings