How to interview for each engineering role

A general-purpose technical interview measures a general-purpose candidate. It finds people who are broadly competent and articulate, which is not the same thing as people who can do the specific job. A platform engineer who has built golden paths and a reliability engineer who has sat through a six-hour Sev1 fail in different places, and a shared question list will surface neither failure.

The other half is the rubric. Without one, an interview is a conversation that two interviewers remember differently a week later, and the debrief becomes a contest of confidence. With one — the same dimensions, the same weights inside an experience band, written down before the first candidate is seen — the debrief is an argument about evidence, which is an argument that can be settled.

These are written for the person running the interview, not the person taking it. The value is in the judgment: knowing which follow-up separates someone who operated the thing from someone who read about it, and knowing how much a two-year candidate's answer on a dimension should weigh against an eight-year candidate's on the same one.