Culture

What do you like best about working there?
What do you like least?
How would you describe this company's culture? engineering culture?
What causes the most conflict among employees here?
What would you change if you could?
How has the company changed in the past five years? How do you think it will change in the next five?
How long has the longest serving team member been there?
- What's the average or median tenure?
How does the company create psychological safety for employees?
How often do you have to be available outside of normal business hours?
Can you give me an example of when a project took a major turn in another direction, and what was the cause of this change?
What was the team's last achievement recognised by the whole company?
When was the last time someone on the team was promoted?

Business

Is it live in prod yet? If not, what's the schedule for going live?
How often are releases done?
Who supports it once it's released?
- On-call?
  - Pager?
  - Email?
Who are the team's/project's customers? What end-users do you deal with? How do they feel about the product?
Design process
- Who does the design of the product? Devs, designers, PMs?
- Where do feature & bugfix requests come from?
- How does work get in front of devs?
- How does design/architecture happen? How are conflicts resolved during that process?
  - How are decisions made?
  - How are they recorded?
  - How are changes noted?
Can you explain the process of "idea to feature retirement" starting with the request from the product owner?
Would my work be full-stack of just backend?
How big is the code base?
When was the last time the team performed a disaster recovery exercise?
What part of the org is this team part of? Who is my boss's boss?
What is the attrition rate for the team?
How does budgeting work with your group? Who controls the budget they get?

Tech stack
- Programming languages
- Databases
- Other services (message queues, file storage, etc.)
- Monitoring and alerting
- Any other interesting bits
What's your remote work setup look like? How many people are remote vs not?
Dev env
- One command setup?
- Run locally or remote?
- Works on Linux?
Development Tools
- Am I able to use whatever development tools I choose without asking permission?
Ticket/task/etc tracking
Development Process
- Pairing?
Testing
- Release with failing tests?
Source control
- Branching strategy
- Code reviews
CI/CD
Docs
QA
Other tools for dev/ops
- Monitoring & alerting
- Distributed tracing
- Deployments (k8s, docker, AWS, etc.)
Incident handling and post-mortems
How do you balance technical/business goals?
What is your level of tech debt?
Reasonable goals & expectations? how to handle missed deadlines?
Do you have any sort of technical principles or vision?

Why is this role open?
- Is this a new role, or am I replacing some who left? If the latter, why did they leave?
What are biggest priorities for the team right now?
What's the most important thing I could do in the first few months towards those priorities?
What’s the biggest challenge for someone stepping into this role?
What would success in this role look like?
What qualities do you think are most important for success in this role?
How many hours of meetings per week?
What might a typical day for me look like?
Flexibility in the org to move to new projects over time?
Core hours? Flex hours? Crunch times?
Room for advancement?
Learning opportunities?

Base salary
Bonus?
- Past bonus history?
Equity or RSUs?
- Vesting schedule?
- Refreshers?
401k?
- Match?
Health insurance options?
Conferences & self-education?
- Costs covered by employer?
- Is is treated as PTO or work time?
PTO?
- Allowed to go negative on PTO balance?
- How many weeks consecutively are allowed?
- Is sick time separate from vacation?
- Year to year rollover?
- If it's unlimited, how much do people actually take?
Connectivity/equipment/home office budget?
- At hire?
- Later?
- Does this include more than just a computer, monitor, etc., like furniture?
What is the employee perf review process?
- For this position specifically, how is performance evaluated?

Working from Taiwan for several months?
How is work travel handled? Will it be an issue if I want a somewhat more expensive seat for legroom?
Contributing to open source?
IP clauses in contract?
Am I allowed to have side projects that I own?

What level is the job offer?
What are the requirements for this level vs. the level above it?
What is the salary band for this level?
What percentage of the company does the equity represent?
What is the valuation of the company?
What is the vesting schedule?
- Is there a 1 year cliff?
- Are there quarterly vesting deadlines I should know about?
What is the strike price?