FAANG Principal Engineer Interview Guide | Generated by AI
I’ll give you an overview of typical interview questions for Principal/Staff Engineer roles at FAANG companies (Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google).
These roles focus heavily on leadership, systems design, and strategic impact rather than just coding ability. Here’s what you can expect:
System Design & Architecture
- Design a large-scale distributed system (e.g., design Twitter/Instagram feed, design a rate limiter, design a CDN)
- How would you design a system to handle billions of requests per day?
- Design a real-time analytics pipeline
- Explain trade-offs between different database choices for a specific use case
- How would you migrate a monolithic system to microservices?
Leadership & Influence
- Tell me about a time you influenced a major technical decision across multiple teams
- How do you handle disagreement with other senior engineers or leadership?
- Describe a situation where you had to convince others to change technical direction
- How do you mentor and grow engineers on your team?
- Give an example of how you’ve driven technical standards across an organization
Problem-Solving & Trade-offs
- How do you approach making decisions with incomplete information?
- Describe a time you made a significant technical trade-off—what did you sacrifice and why?
- How do you balance technical debt against feature delivery?
- Walk me through your process for evaluating new technologies
Past Experience & Impact
- What’s the most complex system you’ve built? What made it complex?
- Describe your biggest technical failure and what you learned
- How have you scaled a system from X to Y users/requests?
- Tell me about a project where you had organization-wide impact
Coding (Yes, still tested but at a higher bar)
- Advanced algorithms and data structures problems
- Usually expected to write cleaner, more optimal code faster than junior candidates
- May include domain-specific questions related to the team
Company-Specific Angles
- Amazon: Heavy on leadership principles, diving deep, ownership
- Google: Strong emphasis on technical depth and scalability
- Meta: Focus on impact, moving fast, building across the stack
- Netflix: Culture fit, freedom & responsibility, context not control
- Apple: Product thinking, attention to detail, cross-functional collaboration
The key difference from mid-level interviews is the expectation that you can operate ambiguously, make architectural decisions with broad impact, and lead without direct authority. Be ready with specific examples using STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, Result) that demonstrate scope and impact.
Would you like me to dive deeper into any specific area, like system design patterns or how to structure your leadership stories?