Former director of engineering here... When I interview a candidate what I'm looking for is creative thinking, ability to solve problems. I like to hear about

Former director of engineering here... When I interview a candidate what I'm looking for is creative thinking, ability to solve problems. I like to hear about programming challenges you have faced, and how you solved them, or creative ways you've found to make processes more efficient. I'll ask you to describe some complex system you built in simple terms. I'll ask about ways you've found to save the company money, or use fewer resources. Even if your interviewers don't ask you these, you can work them into your answers and really set yourself apart from other candidates who only know algo and nothing else. An easy way to word these if you're no Shakespeare is to use the SAR (situation, action, result) format. For example: Interviewer: Tell me about a major project you led [that saved the company money|made operations more efficient] You: At my last company, we had a series of 100 web crawlers running on EC2 at a cost of $5000 per month. I realized that they sat idle 80% of the time since requests were unpredictable. I changed the architecture to make use of AWS Lambda instead, and reduced overall compute costs by 40%, while reducing a potential security risk.