How to Assess Senior Engineers — Beyond the Technical Checklist

Introduction

Hiring senior engineers is one of the highest-impact decisions a business can make — and one of the easiest to get wrong.

Many organisations still assess senior engineers primarily on:

• Coding tests
• Technical interviews
• Stack familiarity

While technical competence is essential, it is no longer sufficient.

In 2025, senior engineers are expected to do far more than write code.

The Expanding Role of the Senior Engineer

Modern senior engineers are expected to:

• Design systems, not just features
• Influence technical direction
• Mentor junior team members
• Communicate with non-technical stakeholders
• Balance speed, quality, and risk
• Make trade-offs under uncertainty

These responsibilities require judgement, communication, and leadership — qualities that are difficult to measure with traditional technical tests.

Why Technical Tests Fall Short

Technical tests are useful — but limited.

Common problems include:

• Over-optimisation for niche skills
• Unrealistic problem sets
• Time-intensive exercises that deter senior candidates
• Tests that favour recent graduates over experienced engineers

Senior candidates often perform poorly on artificial exercises despite being highly effective in real-world environments.

As Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Stack Overflow, once noted:

“The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order of magnitude better.”

That difference rarely shows up in a timed coding challenge.

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What Actually Predicts Senior Engineering Success

Research and experience consistently show that senior engineering success correlates strongly with:

1. Decision-making under ambiguity

Senior engineers must operate without complete information.

2. Communication clarity

Explaining complex concepts simply is a critical skill.

3. System-level thinking

Understanding long-term implications of design choices.

4. Leadership through influence

Guiding teams without relying on authority.

5. Commercial awareness

Aligning technical decisions with business goals.

Better Ways to Assess Senior Engineers

Scenario-based discussions

Discuss real challenges your team faces and explore how the candidate would approach them.

Architecture walkthroughs

Ask candidates to explain systems they’ve designed — trade-offs, failures, and lessons learned.

Stakeholder simulations

Assess how they communicate with product, sales, or leadership.

Retrospective conversations

Explore how they handle failure and course correction.

These approaches reveal far more than isolated coding ability.

The Importance of Contextual Interviews

Senior engineers thrive in context.

Interviews should reflect:

• Your team’s maturity
• Your technical debt
• Your growth stage
• Your constraints

Generic interview processes often filter out the very people you need.

Avoiding the “Brilliant But Toxic” Hire

One of the biggest risks at senior level is hiring someone technically strong but culturally damaging.

Warning signs often appear in:

• How candidates talk about previous teams
• Whether they credit others for success
• Their response to disagreement
• Their willingness to adapt

As Google’s former Head of People Operations Laszlo Bock has said:

“The best leaders create a culture where people feel safe to take risks.”

Senior engineers play a key role in that culture.

Aligning Assessment With Reality

The best hiring processes mirror the job itself.

If the role requires:

• Collaboration → assess collaboration
• Decision-making → assess decision-making
• Leadership → assess leadership

Misalignment here is one of the most common causes of senior mis-hires.

Final Thought

Hiring senior engineers is not about finding the smartest person in the room.

It’s about finding someone who can raise the capability of the entire room.

Organisations that broaden how they assess senior engineers make better hires — and build stronger, more resilient teams.

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