Interview FAQ
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Engagement & Availability3
#Engagement & AvailabilityAre you available right now?#availability-now
Yes—open as of Aug 15, 2025 for full-time, fractional, project, or advisory.
What engagement models do you offer?#engagement-models
Full-time leadership, Fractional CTO (1–3 days/week), project-based delivery, and exec/manager coaching.
How quickly can you start, and can you travel?#start-speed-travel
Advisory can start immediately; larger programs typically 1–2 weeks. Yes—periodic onsite for kickoffs/planning.
Strengths & Outcomes3
#Strengths & OutcomesWhat are your strengths?#strengths
Diagnosing reality fast, simplifying scope, hiring well, and installing mechanisms (cadence, metrics, ownership) that raise the baseline and stick.
What metrics do you care about?#metrics
Revenue/margin, reliability (SLOs/MTTR), and learning velocity. Keep a small set tied to real decisions and review cadences.
Examples of outcomes you’ve driven?#outcomes-driven
Premium feature launches and a-la-carte upsells, pods/on-call rollouts with MTTR down, large SEO-safe migrations, and QA automation that sped releases.
Technical Scope & Stacks3
#Technical Scope & StacksWhat stacks do you and your teams support?#core-stacks
Frontend: React/Next.js, Vue. Backend: Node/TypeScript (Nest/Express), PHP/Laravel. Mobile: React Native primarily; Swift/Kotlin as needed. Data: Postgres/MySQL/Redis.
Platforms, infra, and tooling?#platforms-tooling
AWS/GCP/Vercel/Supabase; CDN/object storage; CI/CD; Sentry/New Relic; PagerDuty; Playwright/TestRail. Cost control baked into designs.
AI/LLM experience?#ai-ml
LLM-assisted dev, prompt/retrieval design, pilot→production guardrails, and data ingestion via Airbyte/Funnel-style pipelines.
First 90 Days & Kickoff2
#First 90 Days & KickoffWhat do your first 90 days look like?#first-90-days
Diagnose (people/product/reliability/$$), align on outcomes, design a minimal plan with owners/checkpoints, then deliver in short loops with visible metrics.
How do you kick off with a new company?#kickoff-sequence
Week 1: discovery + architecture/org audit. Week 2: priority roadmap + 90-day plan. Week 3: cadence, dashboards, staffing adjustments.
Hiring & Talent2
#Hiring & TalentWhat’s your bar for hiring?#hiring-bar
Top-notch or keep looking. Structured loops, work samples, and trial projects when useful. Hire for ownership, collaboration, and bias to ship.
How do you coach engineers and managers?#coaching
Clear growth plans tied to business outcomes, recurring feedback, visible wins, and opportunities to practice leadership.
Leadership & Operating Style2
#Leadership & Operating StyleHow do you operate as a leader?#operating-style
Outcome-driven and product-minded. I clarify goals, align owners, and run short delivery loops. Calm under pressure; direct, data-first communication; write it down; decide and move.
How do you handle misalignment or conflict?#handle-conflict
Surface the decision owner, frame options/tradeoffs with data, capture rationale, and commit. Default to blameless retros and forward motion.
Process & Delivery (SDLC)2
#Process & Delivery (SDLC)What SDLC do you prefer?#sdlc
Dual-track Agile: discovery → POC/MVP → hardening. Trunk-based or short-lived branches, CI/CD, feature flags, progressive rollout. Reserve capacity for tech debt.
How do you drive predictable delivery?#predictable-delivery
Quarterly objectives, fortnightly demos, visible risk registers, burn-up charts, and explicit tradeoffs on scope/time/quality.
Reliability & On-Call2
#Reliability & On-CallHow do you ensure reliability and on-call readiness?#reliability-operating
Service ownership, SLOs, clean alerts, on-call rotations, runbooks, and regular chaos/readiness reviews.
How do you turn incidents into improvements?#handling-failure
Blameless postmortems, systemic root causes, and small, testable changes tracked to closure.
Security & Compliance2
#Security & ComplianceSecurity stance?#security-stance
Principle of least privilege, secrets hygiene, dependency audits, RBAC, and auditable change flows.
Compliance support (SOC 2, etc.)?#compliance-support
Map controls to practices, close gaps pragmatically, and ship team-friendly SOPs and evidence trails.
Team & Org Design2
#Team & Org DesignHow do you scale teams and what structures do you use?#team-scaling-structures
Cross-functional pods with functional guilds, crisp RACI, and KPIs/SLAs. Mechanisms > heroics; raise the baseline via cadence and clarity.
Largest org you’ve led?#largest-org
50+ engineers (peaked ~65) across web, mobile, and QA; global and remote-first.