Tell me about yourself

Framework

1. Present (1 sentence): your current role and what you do day-to-day
2. Past (2 sentences): the experiences that brought you here, emphasizing what's relevant to THIS role
3. Future (1 sentence): why you're excited about this opportunity specifically
4. Keep it under 90 seconds — they have follow-up questions queued up

Sample answer

I'm a senior backend engineer at Stripe, where I lead a team of four building
the merchant payouts platform that moves about $4B a month. Before Stripe I
spent three years at a Series-B fintech, where I owned the move from a
single Postgres database to a sharded write-path that took us from 50k to
2M monthly active users without a rewrite. I'm here because the role you're
hiring for — owning the infrastructure for a similar scaling jump — is
exactly the kind of problem I most enjoy.

Common pitfalls

• Reciting your resume top-to-bottom (they have it)
• Going over 2 minutes
• Not tying your story to the specific role