Bank of America Behavioral Interview for Software Engineer (Engineering)

This behavioral interview reflects Bank of America’s structured, competency-based approach and is typically conducted by a hiring manager and/or senior engineer. Expect STAR-style prompts that probe how you operate in a highly regulated, risk-managed environment while delivering software for large-scale, business‑critical systems. Focus areas based on real candidate experiences include: • Responsible Growth and values alignment: Why Bank of America, examples of doing the right thing for clients/partners, inclusion, and long‑term thinking. • Risk and controls mindset: Handling production changes through approvals/CAB, documenting decisions, ensuring auditability, managing access/segregation of duties, and learning from incidents without repeating control breaks. • Production stability and incident response: Owning Sev1/Sev2 events, communicating clearly to non-technical stakeholders, running post‑mortems/RCAs, and implementing preventative measures (runbooks, monitoring, alerts, SLAs/SLOs). • Collaboration across global teams: Partnering with QA, SRE, InfoSec, and product, coordinating across time zones (e.g., Charlotte–London–India), and managing handoffs while maintaining code quality and delivery velocity. • Delivery in a regulated environment: Balancing speed and compliance, working with legacy plus modern stacks, navigating change management and documentation, and making trade-offs under scrutiny from business and risk partners. • Ownership and accountability: Taking end‑to‑end responsibility for features/services, escalating early, setting expectations, and measuring impact with data. • Communication and stakeholder management: Translating technical risk into business terms, influencing without authority, resolving conflict, and giving/receiving feedback. Typical prompts include: “Tell me about a time you prevented a production incident through a control you implemented,” “Describe a high‑severity outage you managed—what did you do and what changed afterward?,” “How have you balanced delivery speed with audit/compliance requirements?,” and “Give an example of collaborating with globally distributed teams to deliver on a deadline.” Interviewers dig into specifics (tickets, artifacts, metrics) and expect concise narratives with clear outcomes.