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Behavioral: How You Use AI, Lead Engineers, and Work with Another Team or PM

OktaSoftware Engineer · Technical Screen
MediumSoftware EngineerTechnical ScreenBehavioral & Leadership

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A three-part behavioral screen for a software engineer: how you use AI tools in your engineering work, a time you led other engineers on a project, and a project you delivered with another team or a product manager. Tests judgment about AI output, technical leadership, and cross-functional collaboration.

This behavioral segment takes about the first 25 minutes of a one-hour technical phone screen for a software engineering role; the rest of the hour is a coding exercise and a few minutes for your own questions. The interviewer asks three questions in turn, which leaves roughly eight minutes for each answer and its follow-up probes. Answer each with a specific example from your own work.

Clarifying Questions

  • For the first question, should you talk about how you use AI tools in your day-to-day engineering, about AI features you have built into a product, or both?
  • For the leadership question, does leading without a formal title count, for example being the technical owner of a project that other engineers contributed to?
  • For the third question, is a project with another engineering team as useful as one with a product manager, or does the interviewer want the PM relationship specifically?

Part 1 — How you use AI

How do you use AI in your work?

What This Part Should Cover

  • Specific tasks where AI helps, and the tasks deliberately kept away from it
  • How generated output is verified before it reaches production
  • A concrete effect on speed or quality, and a limitation or mistake that changed the practice

Part 2 — Leading other engineers on a project

Tell me about a project where you led other engineers.

What This Part Should Cover

  • Scope, team size, and your role relative to the other engineers
  • How you set technical direction, divided the work and tracked progress
  • A conflict, risk or slipping piece of work you handled, and the outcome for the project and the people

Part 3 — Working with another team or a PM

Tell me about a project you did with another team or with a product manager.

What This Part Should Cover

  • Each side's goals and where they conflicted
  • How requirements, interfaces and dates were agreed and kept in sync
  • The result, and what you would change about working across that boundary

Hints

Hint 1

Show judgment, not enthusiasm: Pick two or three concrete workflows, and be ready to say where you do not trust the output and how you check it before it ships.

Hint 2

Leadership is what changed for others: Choose a story in which your actions changed how other engineers worked: how the work was split, how a technical disagreement was settled, or how someone was unblocked.

Hint 3

Make the friction real: The strongest stories include a real disagreement about scope, priority, timeline or an interface, and show how you resolved it.

Follow-up questions

  • Describe a time an AI tool gave you a confident but wrong answer. How did you catch it?
  • In the leadership story, what would the other engineers say you could have done better?
  • In the cross-team story, what happened when requirements changed late, and who made the call?
  • How do you decide which code or data may be shared with an AI tool?