Learning Paths
Engineering Manager Interview Roadmap
This roadmap is your comprehensive companion to navigating the multifaceted landscape of a FAANG Engineering Manager interview. It goes beyond traditional coding questions, encompassing every critical dimension of the role—people leadership, team management, project execution, system design, communication, and stakeholder collaboration. Whether you’re transitioning from an individual contributor role or stepping up to a more strategic leadership position, this roadmap equips you with the frameworks, insights, and actionable strategies needed to excel in high-stakes interviews with top-tier companies like Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple. By focusing on both the technical and interpersonal competencies, this roadmap ensures you’ll be ready to tackle in-depth system design sessions, present thoughtful approaches to team performance challenges, and engage in compelling leadership discussions. Ultimately, you’ll gain the confidence to navigate the complexities of the engineering manager role at the world’s most influential tech organizations.
Modules:
6
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Learning Objectives
Holistic Preparation: Understand the full spectrum of an engineering manager interview—from technical system design and architecture reviews to leadership case studies and cultural fit conversations.
Technical Mastery: Hone your ability to break down complex system design problems, reason about scalability and reliability, and discuss architectural trade-offs—key skills for technical credibility at FAANG companies.
Leadership and Communication: Learn strategies for demonstrating people management skills, fostering team cohesion, driving results, and effectively communicating technical vision to both engineering and non-engineering stakeholders.
Behavioral Proficiency: Gain insights into handling situational and behavioral questions that reflect real-world challenges—managing conflicts, giving feedback, promoting diversity and inclusion, and inspiring team excellence.
Strategic Thinking: Develop the mindset to approach interviews not just as tests of knowledge, but as opportunities to convey strategic thinking, cross-functional collaboration abilities, and long-term vision alignment.
Confidence and Polish: Learn best practices for presenting your experience, refining your personal pitch, and projecting confidence and authenticity—crucial elements that set great engineering managers apart.
Path Contents
• 65 Chapters • 486 Lessons
Grokking the Engineering Manager Coding Interview
Your ultimate guide to successfully acing Engineering Manager coding interviews.
11 Chapters • 119 Lessons
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1.

Introduction

1 lesson
Grokking the System Design Interview
Ace your system design interview with the original Grokking the System Design Interview course by Design Gurus – ex-FAANG hiring managers. With 30K+ 5★ reviews, this course will help you master scalability, distributed systems, and more.
5 Chapters • 65 Lessons
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2.

Glossary of System Design Basics

19 lessons
System Design Basics
Get familiar with core system design concepts, key architectural components, and building blocks of scalable, distributed software systems.
Key Characteristics of Distributed Systems
Explore key characteristics of distributed systems, including scalability, reliability, availability, efficiency, fault tolerance, and manageability.
Load Balancing
Learn how load balancing improves scalability and availability by distributing traffic using smart algorithms, health checks, and redundancy techniques.
Caching
Learn caching strategies to improve system performance, including cache types, eviction policies, read/write methods, and cache invalidation techniques.
Data Partitioning
Learn data partitioning techniques—horizontal, vertical, hybrid—and partitioning criteria to scale databases, improve performance, and balance workloads.
Indexes
Understand how database indexes optimize query performance, enable efficient lookups, and impact write operations in large-scale systems.
Proxies
Learn how forward and reverse proxies improve security, caching, and traffic control by mediating communication between clients and servers.
Redundancy and Replication
Learn how redundancy and replication improve system reliability and availability through failover strategies and synchronous, asynchronous, and semi-synchronous replication.
SQL vs. NoSQL
Compare relational and non-relational databases to understand schema flexibility, scalability, ACID compliance, and ideal use cases for each.
CAP Theorem
Understand why distributed systems must trade off between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance—only two of the three can be guaranteed at any time.
PACELC Theorem
Learn how PACELC extends CAP by showing that even without partitions, distributed systems must balance latency and consistency in replicated environments.
Consistent Hashing
Learn the architecture of scalable systems using consistent hashing for efficient data partitioning, replication, and dynamic node management.
Long-Polling vs WebSockets vs Server-Sent Events
Understand the system design of real-time communication protocols for scalable push-based updates between client and server.
Bloom Filters
Explore space-efficient system design using Bloom filters for fast, probabilistic membership checks with minimal memory and no false negatives.
Quorum
Design highly available distributed systems using quorum-based consistency models to coordinate read/write operations across replicated nodes.
Leader and Follower
Understand the architecture of leader-based replication in distributed systems for consistent writes, fault tolerance, and coordinated data synchronization.
Heartbeat
Learn how distributed systems use heartbeat signals to detect server failures and maintain reliable request routing and availability.
Checksum
Explore how distributed systems ensure data integrity by using checksums to detect and prevent data corruption during transmission.
Quiz
Test your understanding of system design basic concepts.
3.

System Design Trade-offs

New
22 lessons
Importance of Discussing Trade-offs
Demonstrating trade-offs shows maturity, critical thinking, and real-world design skills crucial for scalable, practical system architecture.
Strong vs Eventual Consistency
Explore consistency models in distributed systems, comparing strong and eventual consistency in terms of latency, availability, accuracy, and scalability trade-offs.
Latency vs Throughput
Understand the difference between latency and throughput, and explore strategies to optimize response time and data processing capacity in systems.
ACID vs BASE Properties in Databases
Understand key differences between ACID and BASE database models, balancing consistency, availability, scalability, and fault tolerance in distributed systems.
Read-Through vs Write-Through Cache
Explore read-through vs write-through caching strategies for improving read performance, data consistency, and integrity in scalable systems.
Batch Processing vs Stream Processing
Compare batch vs stream processing in system design—complexity, resource efficiency, continuous vs scheduled data flow, and real-time responsiveness.
Load Balancer vs. API Gateway
Understand differences between Load Balancer and API Gateway in scalable architectures—traffic distribution, request routing, API management, and availability.
API Gateway vs Direct Service Exposure
Explore API Gateway vs Direct Service Exposure in distributed systems—compare centralized routing and security with direct access and reduced latency.
Proxy vs. Reverse Proxy
Understand how proxies and reverse proxies manage client and server traffic in distributed system design to improve security, caching, and scalability.
API Gateway vs. Reverse Proxy
Learn the difference between API Gateways and Reverse Proxies in distributed systems, focusing on routing, security, load balancing, and orchestration.
SQL vs. NoSQL
Compare SQL vs NoSQL databases based on schema structure, scalability, ACID compliance, flexibility, and best use cases in system design.
Primary-Replica vs Peer-to-Peer Replication
Understand Primary-Replica vs Peer-to-Peer replication models, including data flow, consistency, scalability, fault tolerance, and use cases.
Data Compression vs Data Deduplication
Learn the differences between data compression and deduplication for optimizing storage—focus, scope, efficiency, and best-use scenarios.
Server-Side Caching vs Client-Side Caching
Understand server-side vs client-side caching—how they differ in location, control, performance impact, and best use across web apps.
REST vs RPC
Learn the architectural differences between REST and RPC, including stateless resource handling vs. procedure calls, flexibility, scalability, and performance trade-offs.
Polling vs. Long-Polling vs. WebSockets vs. Webhooks
Compare real-time delivery strategies—Polling, Long-Polling, WebSockets, and Webhooks—for scalable, event-driven system communication.
CDN Usage vs Direct Server Serving
Learn when to use a Content Delivery Network vs direct server hosting based on traffic scale, geographic distribution, and caching efficiency.
Serverless Architecture vs Traditional Server-based
Learn serverless system design benefits like dynamic scaling and reduced ops versus traditional server hosting with full control and overhead.
Stateful vs Stateless Architecture
Explore the architecture of stateful vs stateless systems, comparing session handling, scalability, and design trade-offs for APIs and web services.
Hybrid Cloud Storage vs All-Cloud Storage
Explore hybrid cloud vs all-cloud storage architectures, balancing scalability, compliance, and control for secure, flexible enterprise data strategies.
Token Bucket vs Leaky Bucket
Learn how Token Bucket and Leaky Bucket algorithms manage network traffic shaping, rate limiting, and handling of bursty data.
Read Heavy vs Write Heavy System
Explore how system design varies for read-heavy and write-heavy workloads with techniques like batching, replication, and data partitioning.
5.

Appendix

2 lessons
Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview
Learn system design through architectural review of real systems.
11 Chapters • 118 Lessons
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1.

Introduction

1 lesson
10.

Final Assessment

2 lessons
11.

Appendix

1 lesson
Grokking Microservices Design Patterns
Master microservices design patterns for designing scalable, resilient, and more manageable systems.
14 Chapters • 93 Lessons
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Grokking the Engineering Manager Interview
Master the art of engineering management and ace your next big interview!
11 Chapters • 45 Lessons
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3.

The Interview Process for the Engineering Manager Role

3 lessons
5.

Crafting Your Responses for the Interview

2 lessons
11.

Final Takeaways

2 lessons
Grokking Engineering Leadership Interviews
Master the art of engineering management and ace your next leadership interview with confidence and skill.
13 Chapters • 46 Lessons
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11.

Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in Leadership

2 lessons
13.

Final Takeaways

2 lessons

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