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Sales Engineer Interview Questions

1

Tell me about how you were able to translate the needs of multiple stakeholders into a successful program and or partnership?

Behavioral

2

Tell me about a time you were able to reduce the budget for a client/partner and achieve greater results?

Behavioral

3

Tell me about a time when you had to support a business initiative with which you didn�t necessarily agree. How did you handle it?

Behavioral

4

I want to imagine you are the expert on a subject, how do you make sure everyone understands what you need to make the project successful?

Behavioral

5

Tell me about a time when you failed to meet a deadline. Describe the course of events and how you handled it.

Behavioral

6

Tell me about a time when an internal team was not meeting your standards and how you were able to coach them to improve/up their standards? How did you go about it?

Behavioral

7

Tell me about a time when you had to communicate a major project change to your group? How did you go about it, how did your team respond?

Behavioral

8

Tell me about a project you were managing where a dispute between stakeholders threatened the success of the project, and what did you do?

Behavioral

9

Tell me about a decision that you have made in the past that you would change today and why

Behavioral

10

Tell me about a time when you were pressured to break the rules

Behavioral

11

What would you do to improve inclusion in the workplace?

Behavioral

12

Tell me about a time when you took on something significant outside your area of responsibility. Why was it important? What was the outcome?

Behavioral

13

How do you deal with someone who does not finish what they promised?

Behavioral

14

Imagine you worked in a place with a negative culture, what would you do about it? How would you improve it?

Behavioral

15

Tell me about a time when you went above and beyond the call of duty for a key stakeholder and or client. Why did you take the action you did? What was the outcome?

Behavioral

16

Tell me about a time when you had to move forward with a decision that you weren�t in agreement with and the decision ended having a positive outcome

Behavioral

17

Tell me about a time that you were not satisfied with the status quo, what you did to change it and were you successful in that process.

Behavioral

18

Give an example of a time you requested additional funding/budget to complete a project. Why was it needed? Did you try to figure out another approach? Did you get the additional resources? Why or why not?

Behavioral

19

Give an example of when you saw a peer struggling and decided to step in and help. What was the situation and what actions did you take? What was the outcome?

Behavioral

20

Think about your current job and walk me through the areas of your role that you think are the most challenging.

Behavioral

21

Tell me about a time you built trust with an upset external stakeholder?

Behavioral

22

Tell me about a time you've noticed that a company's core principles or ethics collided with black letter law. What was the cause of the misalignment?

Behavioral

23

You start working in a new company, you realized there is a dashboard showing the business metrics no one use it, how will you convince your colleagues to use the dashboard, which communication tools will you use?

Open-ended

24

How do you balance the needs of the customer vs. the needs of the business?

Open-ended

25

Help a customer grow and evolve their business utilizing GCP?

Open-ended

26

Walk me through a time when you positioned a premium product against a more economical alternative and won?

Behavioral

27

Walk me through your process of qualifying a prospect's technical needs.

Open-ended

28

How would you sell potential prospects on the value of GCP?

Open-ended

29

How would you prioritize the accounts in your pipeline?

Open-ended

30

How do you make sure you are advocating for the right technologies?

Open-ended

31

How do you work with stakeholders that monopolize your time?

Open-ended

32

How do you establish effective partnerships? And how do you align incentives in a partnership relationship so they are mutually beneficial?

Open-ended

33

How would you deal with a stakeholder who continually disregarded your requests for key information? What would you do to remedy the situation?

Open-ended

34

What is the difference between IaaS and PaaS? Can you give me an example of IaaS? And PaaS?

Open-ended

35

What is a Lift and Shift Cloud Migration?

Open-ended

36

How would you determine whether to opt for cloud native Deployment Manager or third-party Terraform for infrastructure as code on Google Cloud?

Open-ended

37

What are the types of NoSQL databases?

Open-ended

38

How do you manage large-scale data migrations using a phased approach?

Open-ended

39

What is the difference between virtualization and containerization? Can you give me an example of each?

Open-ended

40

How would you architect the data storage for a SaaS reporting dashboard for an IOT device that stores the real-time geo-location of physical assets across the globe?

Open-ended

41

What is the difference between High Availability vs. Fault Tolerance vs. Disaster Recovery?

Open-ended

42

Imagine you are working with the IRS to migrate their internal call center application from an on prem data center to the cloud. The IRS is also looking for ways to update it�s outdated call center application and data warehouse with GCP.

Open-ended

43

Imagine you have a university campus that is currently using an on prem data center. They are looking to migrate their internal custom built administrative apps and infrastructure to the cloud. Walk me through how you help this university accomplish this objective using GCP.

Open-ended

44

How would you design infrastructure and APIs for the shopping cart of an e-commerce website like Amazon in a way that allows you to get real-time analytics?

Open-ended

45

There is a TV show with 5 million viewers at prime time viewing hours. How would you design the architecture of the reporting dashboard for this TV Show?

Open-ended

46

What does the GCP ecosystem look like today and in order to be successful 5 years from now, how will the ecosystem change?

Open-ended

47

Imagine GCP�s sales team is trying to double the revenue over the next 24-months in the US market. Walk me through the steps you would take to support the sales team's efforts with partnership programs?

Open-ended

48

How would you characterize Google's approach to partnerships? How would you improve it?

Open-ended

49

You were given the task of improving client satisfaction from 75% to 85%. Describe your strategy for approaching this task.

Open-ended

50

You need to prepare for a meeting with Goldman Sachs [*insert relevant company*] to convince them to double their investment in GCP. How would you approach this task?

Open-ended

51

Imagine you just joined Google and you are given the task to assess why an operational dashboard built for a partner a few months ago is not being used. You learn that no one trusts the data displayed on this dashboard. What steps do you take moving forward?

Open-ended

52

Walk me through a potential partnership you think GCP could leverage to grow awareness in the US region. How would you qualify those partnerships?

Open-ended

53

Walk me through a past deal or partnership that you created in which you needed to garner executive support as well as work across multiple functional teams at your company?

Open-ended

54

Imagine your manager has asked you to prepare a GTM strategy on partnerships that would enhance GCPs relationships with the financial services industry. Walk me through the steps you would take to accomplish this objective.

Open-ended

55

How do you manage frequently changing stakeholder requirements while developing a new partnership program?

Open-ended

56

Management has asked you to design a dashboard to report on the status partnership effort that Google has for the US. Walk me through how you would design this dashboard and the decision support systems this would drive.

Open-ended

57

How would you build a GCP technology practice within a partner's organization? What metrics would you track to show the success of the partnership?

Open-ended

58

When working on a POC with a partner, how do you know when you�ve gathered all the necessary requirements to move onto the solution design?

Open-ended

59

You�ve been assigned a major project and are halfway through when you realize that you�ve made a mistake that requires you to go back to the beginning to fix it. How would you handle that while still trying to make your deadline?

Open-ended

60

AWS has successfully partnered with startup accelerators and VCs and seen great adoption because of these partnerships. How would you convince 1000 startups in the US to adopt GCP over AWS?

Open-ended

61

Tell me about a time the testing a new partnership did not turn out as planned and what you did to fix the original plan?

Behavioral

62

Tell me about a time when you linked two or more problems together and identified an underlying issue? Were you able to build a scalable solution to the issue?

Behavioral

63

Tell me about the most successful partnership you have developed and what made the partnership so successful?

Behavioral

64

Tell me about a time when you came across a violation of a data access policy in a previous position. How did you handle this situation?

Behavioral

65

Tell me about a situation where you achieved a satisfactory outcome to a problem that others thought couldn�t be solved.

Behavioral

66

Tell me about a time you have had to coordinate the efforts of multiple departments to successfully launch a new partnership.

Behavioral

67

Tell me about a time you were working on a project that ran the risk of not meeting its goals. What was your objective and why was it in jeopardy?

Behavioral

68

Tell me about a time when you had to work with 2+ influential stakeholders (equally powerful) who had 2 completely different agendas. How did you handle the situation?

Behavioral

69

Tell me about a time when you were responsible for partnering across business functions to implement a work process innovation.

Behavioral

70

What has been your toughest Architecture implementation in Cloud and why??Tell me about a situation where you faced resistance and pushback during the development of a new partnership.

Behavioral

71

Tell me about a time you implemented a successful partnership involving several cross-functional stakeholders?

Behavioral

72

Most of us at one time or another have felt frustrated or impatient when dealing with a customer and or key stakeholder. Can you tell us about a time when you felt this way and how you dealt with it? When do you think it�s appropriate to push back or say no to an unreasonable customer request?

Behavioral

73

Tell me about your hiring process when you are hiring key positions such as direct reports. Where do you go for talent? What resources do you employ? What are the steps in the process?

Behavioral

74

Tell me about your most successful cloud integration strategy

Behavioral

75

The TPM�s that you manage will all be working on complex programs, how do you make sure you understand the programs well enough to guide them?

Behavioral

76

What are the three most important components of mentorship and why?

Open-ended

77

You are tasked with creating a new program only knowing the desired result and given no additional information, how do you make sure the program is successful?

Open-ended

78

Tell me about a time a technical counterpart on the customer side did not agree with your assessment and how you won them over?

Behavioral

79

Tell me about a time you had challenges with regulators and how you overcame them?

Behavioral

80

What items would you focus on when talking to a CISO about security and compliance risks?

Behavioral

81

Tell me about a time you recognized an opportunity to improve an internal process and how you went about it?

Behavioral

82

Create a new Google product from scratch.

Open-ended

83

How do you make a client more productive?

Open-ended

84

Tell me about a challenging diversity situation that has occurred in your career?

Behavioral

85

Tell me about a conflict with an internal stakeholder and how you resolved it?

Behavioral

86

Tell me about a time you recognized a technical opportunity for a client that meant purchasing additional services?

Behavioral

87

Troubleshoot a roadblock for me.

Open-ended

88

What do you think is the most interesting trend in ML right now and why?

Open-ended

89

How do you keep up with ML trends?

Open-ended

90

How do you overcome technical objections with your ML knowledge?

Open-ended

91

How would you help a customer create better cloud architecture by utilizing ML?

Open-ended

92

What are the different steps you would take to guide your customer if she wants to develop an app using GCP products?

Open-ended

93

A friend wants to open a bakery. How would you help them?

Open-ended

94

Establish a customer advisory board.

Open-ended

95

Explain GCP to a client that knows very little about the cloud?

Open-ended

96

Explain GCP to a customer that does not know a lot about the cloud?

Open-ended

97

How do you make a clients more productive?

Open-ended

98

How do you make sure cloud processes align with more centralized processes?

Open-ended

99

How do you present?

Open-ended

100

How do you prioritize two urgent deadlines? -

Open-ended

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