The search for exceptional senior software engineers is a high-stakes endeavor. For recruiters and team leads, it’s a constant challenge: sifting through resumes, trying to discern genuine depth from well-rehearsed buzzwords, and feeling the pressure to build high-performing teams where a mis-hire at the senior level can be particularly costly.
On the other side, talented senior engineers often struggle to effectively convey the breadth and depth of their experience within the confines of an interview, to showcase their strategic thinking that goes beyond code, and to demonstrate the leadership and mentorship qualities that define their seniority.
We sat down with Andrei Kuharenko, Lead Software Engineer at Mitrix, who brings years of experience in building and leading technical teams. He shared his comprehensive approach to interviewing, offering invaluable insights into how Mitrix uncovers and cultivates top-tier senior talent.
How can organizations bridge this gap and truly identify the individuals who will drive innovation and excellence? Let’s figure it out.
When you’re trying to get a real sense of a senior engineer’s technical depth, what kind of discussions or tasks really tell you what you need to know?
I’d emphasize a few key areas: system design and a thorough understanding of its architecture, specifically, how elements are structured and the rationale behind why certain choices were made over others. It’s vital to explore the decisions and trade-offs in their previous projects and to understand which tasks they implemented.
The goal is to have wide-ranging technical conversations to gauge their actual depth of experience, not just a superficial familiarity with concepts. This dialogue often uncovers how they’ve tackled challenges, the solutions they developed, and the critical lessons learned along the way. While a resume provides an overview of technologies and tasks, the interview is where we really drill down into specific areas.
Given time constraints, we can’t cover everything. So, the focus is on core competencies, tailored to the project’s demands and the candidate’s specific profile – whether that’s backend, frontend, cloud technologies, or deployment strategies.
A resume can paint a compelling picture, but it doesn’t always tell the full story. How do you dig deeper to verify a candidate’s genuine, hands-on experience?
With lengthy resumes, the sheer volume of information can make effective evaluation a challenge. It’s crucial to pinpoint their responsibilities, the specific tasks they handled, and their precise role within each project – details that aren’t always obvious from the written description.
Equally important is analyzing their listed technologies to ensure they genuinely correspond to the tasks performed. We need to make sure there isn’t a mismatch where numerous technologies are listed, but in reality, the candidate had only limited, superficial, or perhaps automated interaction with them. Confirming the true extent of their experience is difficult at the resume-review stage alone, as project technologies are often listed comprehensively, while tasks can be vaguely described. True verification of what a candidate has actually done, understands, and has utilized can only really happen during a live conversation.
Moreover, this primarily concerns hard skills. While coding assignments and similar tests can be useful, the inherent stress of an interview setting makes it hard to accurately gauge true performance. Therefore, I also rely considerably on my intuition – how the person communicates, answers questions, articulates their thoughts, proposes solutions, and, crucially, takes responsibility for those solutions and can implement them.
Architectural decision-making is critical for senior roles. What kinds of questions best reveal a candidate’s ability to think strategically and make sound architectural choices?
Many factors are important here, but in essence, I’d highlight a solid understanding of fundamental concepts and architectural patterns, along with experience applying them. Often, a broad perspective is more valuable than deep experience in a very narrow field. That said, prior experience certainly helps them make quicker decisions and generate options, as they’ve likely encountered similar situations before.
The ability to ask the right questions, transform them into clear requirements, understand the core problem, and then propose viable solutions is key. Therefore, it’s beneficial to discuss things like architectural patterns, reference architectures, design patterns, application modernization for specific requirements, and the understanding of non-functional requirements, which are essentially architectural properties.
Tech landscape is always evolving. How do you identify candidates who have a genuine capacity for growth and adaptability, rather than just relying on their existing skillset?
This is quite challenging to determine definitively, but through discussion, you can focus on and explore what the person has been learning recently. For instance, what books are they reading, if any? Do they attend or watch conferences? How do they stay informed about the latest industry developments? This could include online courses, YouTube videos, articles, blogs, podcasts, and more.
It’s also important to ask how the candidate has developed their skills and learned new things, and what resources they used. We often encounter self-taught individuals – perhaps even more frequently than those with formal IT education – and understanding their journey into the field can be revealing. This helps paint a picture of why they are where they are now and potentially where they’re heading, which in turn offers insight into their adaptability.
Discussing any experience with mentorship – whether they’ve had it, enjoyed it, and what it entailed – can also be telling. However, as with anything, there can be discrepancies between how someone presents in an interview and how they perform on the job. The project environment itself plays a significant role; if it doesn’t offer growth opportunities, even an adaptable person might just conform to the status quo, which then introduces its own limitations.
Mentorship and leadership are key for senior engineers. What’s your approach to evaluating a candidate’s potential to effectively mentor team members and lead a team?
Here, you need to observe how the person explains concepts and conveys their thoughts: how well they articulate answers, the depth of their responses, and their ability to connect various components, technologies, and concepts to solve a problem or task.
Regarding mentorship, you can directly ask about their experience and attitude towards it to understand where they currently stand – not everyone has this experience, nor does everyone desire it. Then, inquire about their willingness to mentor if they haven’t before or have done so in the past. Often, people may not have tried it, or might want to but don’t know where to start; discussing this can reveal if they just need a nudge or some support.
For team leadership, many more factors come into play. These include communication skills (especially with clients), the ability to work with the team, prioritize tasks, organize work, understand development processes and methodologies, delegate effectively, ask clarifying questions, support team members, identify and preemptively address challenges, motivate the team, propose solutions, and lead by example without shying away from hands-on work.
It’s also useful to ask about the roles where they feel most effective or prefer to work (their desired role within a project, team, or company) and the types of tasks they enjoy solving. Several factors are vital here:
- Teamwork
- Understanding of development processes and methodologies
- Technological knowledge
- Ability to find answers and learn new things
- Willingness to take responsibility
- Readiness to take on new work and set an example for others
This list might not be exhaustive, as leaders often emerge organically. A supportive atmosphere within the team, department, and company is crucial for this; otherwise, it’s hard to find individuals willing to challenge norms and relentlessly drive progress.
Interview with Andrei, Team Lead at Mitrix
Beyond core technical skills, creativity is invaluable. How do you challenge candidates with problems designed to showcase their innovative thinking and problem-solving creativity?
We usually start by discussing the candidate’s past experiences, focusing on complex and interesting problems they’ve tackled, how they approached them, and any obstacles they faced. Then, during the conversation, we explore various topics from different angles. We try to understand how tasks could be solved, perhaps identifying areas that might require unconventional solutions, further research, or an exploration of alternative options.
This approach works particularly well in the System Design portion of the interview. Here, we attempt to construct a system design: conceptualizing components, choosing an architectural style, selecting technologies, and defining communication methods, protocols, and algorithms. This phase effectively reveals their ability to ask pertinent questions, think critically, make decisions, and choose options based on assumptions, calculations, and constraints. Not everything always goes perfectly, of course, but it provides a good overview of how the candidate views the bigger picture – and whether they can see it at all, rather than just the individual parts they’ve worked with previously.
You could say this part is often the most challenging for many, but it’s also where they can truly demonstrate imagination and devise something unique. Importantly, there’s no single “correct” answer. What truly matters is their reasoning, thought process, acceptance of certain trade-offs, and ultimately, the architectural solution itself as the outcome of their work.
It’s often said that great engineers understand the “why” behind the “what”. How do you assess if a candidate grasps the business context and implications of their technical work, not just the code itself?
It’s important to refer to the tasks and roles the candidate held in their previous positions. Specifically, consider if they had lead roles and how they operated, particularly their communication with the team and, quite commonly, with the business side.
To gauge their understanding, it’s helpful to discuss how tasks were formulated and whether they were involved in identifying and articulating business problems to propose solutions. After all, understanding problems and pain points often drives the need to create or modernize systems and processes. Did the candidate proactively suggest improvements, and if so, how? Did they write documentation for various stakeholders?
There’s an ongoing discussion in the industry about T-shaped skills versus deep specialization. In your view, is it generally better for a senior engineer to be a deep expert in a specific area, or more of a broad generalist, and why?
When I look at this, engineers should definitely be strong specialists in their main field – deep knowledge of core tech, but also staying current with related areas. Seniors, especially, need a broader view, understanding the full SDLC and being able to step into new territories, within reason.
Architects, though, usually benefit more from breadth than pure depth. Their backgrounds vary, and they need to learn quickly, adapt across diverse domains, and still show solid expertise.
Today’s unstable market and the rise of AI are pushing specialists to become more versatile – able to handle almost anything. For example, in the US, there’s a big push for engineers who can work across many languages and technologies. This doesn’t always mean higher pay, as it can be a strategy to rely less on expensive, narrowly focused experts.
So, while we’ve talked about T-shaped skills for a long time, it’s clear engineering mastery isn’t as narrow as we might think. Personally, I believe it’s best to be a versatile specialist: have strong knowledge in key areas, but always be learning and broadening your horizons. Clear responsibilities are still important. But crucially, the ability to solve fuzzy problems and define solutions for businesses that aren’t sure what they want? That’s a powerful skill AI can’t replicate yet.
Ensuring objectivity in interviews is a constant challenge, especially with the rise of AI tools. What’s your strategy for maintaining a fair evaluation process?
It’s tough to be definitive, but fairness in evaluation really comes down to a combination of things: the candidate’s responses, my overall impression, and the general atmosphere of the interview.
After each interview, I pause to reflect: how it went, the quality of answers, any shortcomings, and what was clear. This shapes my feedback. You often know during the interview if someone isn’t hitting the mark. Even aiming for objectivity, sometimes the “aftertaste,” as they say, isn’t great, and we decide not to proceed.
When there are several strong candidates, choosing the best is tough, and company or project specifics might tip the scale. Ultimately, gut feeling plays a part – can I see myself working with them? Can I trust them with responsibilities? If that feeling’s missing, I re-evaluate my notes. If concerns remain, we pass.
Regarding AI tools, they’re booming, and it’s an unavoidable trend. That’s why at Mitrix, we aim to be AI-enabled, integrating them into our work. However, we must be cautious. Don’t rely on AI 100%, especially given issues like hallucinations and unreliable info from current generative AI.
In interviews, recording or transcription tools (with consent) haven’t been very helpful for us, especially for tech talks or soft skill analysis.
From the candidate’s side, I don’t see the point of heavily relying on AI during an interview. If they immediately turn to AI for answers, it signals they don’t offer much unique value as a specialist – we can all use AI. A candidate’s true value is their unique ability to apply their skills to bring value, to handle ambiguity, ask the right questions, find answers, and tackle new challenges. These are things AI can’t do when problems aren’t straightforward.
So, if a candidate constantly defers to AI (“I’ll just ask AI”), that’s a red flag for an interview. For actual work, AI is fine; it can optimize routine tasks. But not in an interview. Even getting good AI answers requires skillful prompting. With AI, it’s always “trust, but verify”.
Interviewing senior engineers has its tricky spots. What do you find toughest, and how do you tackle those challenges?
A typical interview flows through several stages: an introduction, a review of their experience, a technical discussion, a System Design challenge, a general wrap-up, and finally, the candidate’s questions.
The technical discussion is usually the longest, though its length can vary a lot based on the candidate’s experience and skills. Even if it becomes clear a candidate is struggling and likely not a fit, we generally see the process through, adapting as needed.
The goal isn’t just to list hard skills, but to understand the depth of their knowledge and practical application, not just a superficial grasp of concepts without knowing the “why” or “how”. We aim for good coverage without getting so deep into one topic that we run out of time for others. So, we touch on various technologies and their uses.
System Design, while not simple, is more creative and shorter than the technical deep dive, yet it often yields more insights. The key here is seeing how well the candidate can design systems, tackle problems from the top down, think critically, make informed decisions, and then visualize and explain their solution.
If I had to rank them by difficulty for the candidate:
- System Design: This really tests everything, especially the ability to break down a complex problem and see the big picture.
- Technical discussion: This involves talking about various technologies like Backend/Frontend, Databases, Cloud, DevOps, design patterns, messaging, containers, their application, and their direct experience with them.
Good teamwork with recruiters makes a big difference. How do you and your recruitment partners work together to make the hiring process smoother for everyone, especially the candidates?
I wouldn’t say we work extremely closely, but at the start of a candidate search, I try to understand the project specifics, target roles, and timelines to outline search possibilities and requirements. This clarifies how to evaluate candidates and what to focus on. During the search, we discuss candidates and assess suitability, adjusting criteria if needed. For instance, if we’re seeking a Senior Developer but mostly find Mid-level profiles, we adjust when possible. This often relates to offered rates and salaries; hiring a true senior might not be feasible if the market doesn’t align.
We use a feedback template, which I’ve updated slightly. It’s comprehensive and helps collect detailed candidate data for later analysis.
Getting the right senior talent on board quickly is so important. How does Mitrix bring together the recruitment side and the tech evaluation to make that happen efficiently?
Our hiring process kicks off with engineers defining project needs while the recruitment team does preliminary screening to filter candidates. Resumes and often initial video chats give us an early picture for further filtering.
Next, we dive into the project specifics, assessing the tech stack. If a team’s already in place, we chat with members to get insights beyond the standard job description. This gives us a fuller project view and helps us prepare candidates – it’s important they’re ready for the role too.
During the interview, we evaluate candidates live, seeing how they fit the role and their resume. Afterwards, we take time for reflection and detailed feedback. It’s worth noting that while some people are versatile, specializations tend to be narrower, even as candidate requirements increase globally.
Post-interview, I’ll discuss the candidate with the recruiter to decide on next steps – moving forward, perhaps with some considerations, or declining.
Maintaining a candidate pipeline is key. It gives us choices, especially when hiring quickly, ensuring great candidates aren’t missed and that everyone who is ready gets a shot, potentially for other projects too.
So, in a nutshell, the process is:
- Preliminary screening
- Project and requirements analysis
- Team communication (if applicable)
- Technical interview
- Reflection and feedback
- Recruiters’ discussion and next steps
- Candidate queue analysis
That’s roughly our approach to finding the right fit.
Can you think of a time when Mitrix’s hiring approach really nailed it, and you found a senior engineer who just went on to do amazing things?
Yes, many individuals have successfully passed their probation and integrated well into their roles.
For instance, last year, a project was expanding, and we needed two more engineers. The goals were clear, and we understood the project and client well. After a fair number of interviews – it took some time, but we found them – two engineers were hired. They quickly joined the project, eventually taking over from another team member, and significantly strengthened and stabilized development. They took on responsibility and successfully drove both new features and project maintenance. We’ve had other successes too. On a previous project, I needed to find my own replacement as the project continued. We identified a colleague within the company whom I recommended. He passed the client interview, and the project continued successfully, likely still evolving with new technologies.
When it comes to the final decision for a senior role, it’s never just one thing. How do you find the right balance between their tech skills, how they’d fit with the team, and their potential to grow?
Finding the right balance when hiring is tricky, as things can change once someone’s on the job. Still, we try to weigh several key aspects:
- Technical skills: Obviously crucial for doing the work and proposing solutions. Some gaps are okay if there’s a real desire to learn and figure things out – people can always grow on the job.
- Cultural fit: Vital for team cohesion, both internally and with clients. It’s tough to verify perfectly beforehand; you often only see the true fit once they’re part of the team.
- Growth potential: Also key, as projects evolve. When someone establishes themselves well, it benefits everyone. This can mean growing in their role, experience, or expertise.
While these three factors are a good guide, project requirements are paramount. Sometimes, a role is purely for support or maintenance, meaning growth opportunities might be limited. We have to be mindful of this. Placing a high-potential individual in a stagnant role often leads to them leaving, which is a loss.
So, it’s about balancing project needs, the current situation, and the candidate’s own desires and capabilities. Every decision involves weighing these, especially aligning expectations with reality, particularly if you know the project well.
And let’s not forget soft skills – they’re incredibly crucial today, especially with remote work and overall communication. Strong communication, clear thinking, the ability to propose solutions logically (even if the exact answer isn’t known), and staying engaged in conversation are highly valued. Being able to explain things clearly and stay focused is prized more than ever.
How does the back-and-forth feedback between your engineering team and the recruiters help Mitrix get better at hiring great senior people?
This is where we can really refine our search and selection criteria, including suggesting better initial screening questions. It’s crucial to set the right bar, clearly define who we’re looking for, and understand why – what gap this new hire fills and their purpose.
For instance, if a project needs a new team member but the role is vague or more supportive, we need to factor that in and prepare candidates accordingly. On the other hand, if we need an active developer with potential for a Team Lead role, the search should focus on relevant experience and growth prospects.
These details should be discussed alongside interview results when decisions are made and feedback goes to the recruitment team. Sometimes, initial options don’t pan out as expected, which leads us to ask how we can improve next time. It all boils down to strong communication and a solid process aimed at finding the best fit within our constraints.
Looking at what’s happening in the market and tech trends, how do you see your approach to finding top senior engineers evolving?
That’s a great question! While AI could help by gathering more data and analytics, I rely mostly on experience and current technology trends. It’s important to stay updated through news, conferences, articles, and podcasts, but the fundamentals of software development haven’t changed much.
GenAI and related AI technologies are gaining popularity, expanding capabilities, and assisting with routine tasks. However, this doesn’t alter the core skills needed. Most hiring questions remain consistent, with minor tweaks based on candidate performance. The main shift is that expectations for speed have increased, even if reality hasn’t caught up.
Junior and mid-level engineers face more challenges today because senior engineers excel at solving problems amid uncertainty and unclear requirements.
Looking ahead, some changes we might see include:
- Adding questions about AI use in work and life
- Evolving the System Design section to assess how candidates ask questions and build systems from requirements
- Continued focus on cloud technologies, SDLC, and DevOps
- Maintaining core tech stacks like .NET, Java, Python, Go, and JavaScript/TypeScript, adapting as languages and platforms evolve
Ultimately, while the landscape evolves, fundamental skills, real experience, and a collaborative mindset remain key to identifying and nurturing great talent.