What questions to ask in a technical interview

Short answer

Ask about the team’s development workflow, on-call rotation, technical debt management, and how success is measured for the role. Avoid questions easily answered by the job posting.

Details

Great questions reveal your priorities and help you evaluate the employer. Consider asking: "How do you balance feature delivery with refactoring?" or "Can you walk me through a recent incident and what you changed afterward?" These show you care about sustainable engineering.

You can also ask about growth: "What does the path to senior engineer look like here?" For understanding the difference between levels, see What is the difference between junior and senior developer roles. If the role involves DevOps, ask whether they practice continuous delivery vs continuous deployment and how automated their pipelines are.

Tips

• Prepare 5-7 questions; some will be answered naturally during the conversation.
• Ask about the tech stack’s pain points, not just its highlights, to get an honest picture.
• If negotiating later, the answers to these questions become leverage points; see How to negotiate a software engineer salary for tactics.