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How to Approach Craft Interviews: Behavioral, Incident, and Technical Communication
Craft interviews test your engineering judgment, communication, and leadership through behavioral questions, postmortem walkthroughs, ship-or-not decisions, and technical writing scenarios. This guide gives you the IMPACT framework for behavioral answers and the RESPOND model for incident questions — the systematic approaches that separate Staff engineers from Senior engineers in L5/L6/E6 interviews at Meta, Google, Amazon, and Stripe.
What Craft Interviews Are Testing
Craft interviews assess the non-coding dimensions of engineering excellence. They appear in senior (L5+) and staff (L6+) loops at most major tech companies, often as a dedicated round called "Leadership", "Collaboration", "Craft", or "Engineering Judgment."
The four craft interview formats:
- Behavioral: "Tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical decision" (STAR format)
- Incident response: "You're on-call and the payment service just started returning 500s"
- Ship-or-not: "The A/B test shows a regression in one metric. Do you ship?"
- Technical communication: "Write an RFC for this design" or "How would you present this architectural tradeoff to a non-technical stakeholder?"
What differentiates a 9/10 answer at L5 vs L6:
- L5: "I convinced my manager to change the approach by explaining the technical risks."
- L6: "I built alignment by first understanding why the manager's approach was proposed, validating the underlying business goal, then proposing a path that achieved the same goal with lower risk — which I quantified and presented to both my manager and the PM."
The L6 answer shows: empathy with opposing view, quantified tradeoffs, stakeholder mapping, and a documented path forward. Craft questions are where staff-level candidates distinguish themselves.