Nike Software Engineer Behavioral Interview Template (Culture & Collaboration Focus)

This 60-minute behavioral interview for Nike software engineers is designed to assess how you solve problems, collaborate, and lead within Nike’s consumer-obsessed, team-first culture. Interviewers (typically an engineering manager or senior engineer) use a structured, probing, STAR-based approach to dive deep into real past experiences that map to Nike’s maxims and values. What this interview covers at Nike: - Consumer/Athlete Obsession: Times you prioritized the end athlete/consumer, balanced speed vs. quality, and measured impact (e.g., reliability, latency, conversion, or launch-readiness during peak events such as SNKRS drops or holiday traffic). - Teaming Across Functions and Time Zones: Partnering with product, design, data science, platform/SRE, and retail/e-commerce stakeholders; navigating global teams (North America, EMEA, Greater China, APLA) and handoffs; communicating tradeoffs to non-technical partners. - Ownership and Delivery: Taking initiative on ambiguous goals, shaping scope, unblocking dependencies, and driving outcomes for high-visibility launches; following through with retrospectives and continuous improvement. - Resilience and Operational Excellence: Learning from incidents, on-call experiences, and runbook/process improvements; building guardrails for scale and reliability that protect brand trust. - Inclusion and Values Alignment: Creating space for diverse perspectives, mentoring, and modeling Nike’s ‘win as a team’ mindset; demonstrating integrity and doing the right thing under pressure. - Craft Mindset in a Product Company: How you balance engineering rigor with product velocity; pragmatic decision-making, tech debt tradeoffs, and long-term platform thinking supporting multiple brands (e.g., Nike and Converse). Typical format and flow: - 5 minutes: Introductions, role and team context. - 40–45 minutes: 3–4 STAR deep dives with follow-up probes (expect ‘tell me about a time…’ questions with multiple layers of why/how/impact). Examples may be drawn from e-commerce, mobile apps, personalization platforms, supply chain/fulfillment, or cloud migrations. - 5–10 minutes: Candidate questions about team culture, collaboration patterns, and expectations. What strong answers look like at Nike: - Specific, recent stories with clear role, constraints, metrics, and business impact (e.g., improved checkout stability for a regional launch, reduced p95 latency during a peak event, or accelerated partner integration timelines). - Evidence of cross-functional influence, inclusive decision-making, and credible communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders across regions. - Reflection and growth: what you’d do differently, how you institutionalized learnings (runbooks, dashboards, playbooks), and how you upleveled the team. Red flags: - Vague ownership, lack of measurable outcomes, or difficulty explaining tradeoffs and stakeholder alignment. - Little evidence of teamwork, learning mindset, or respect for process/quality in a brand-sensitive environment. Preparation guidance aligned to Nike’s style: - Prepare 4–6 STAR stories spanning ambiguity, conflict resolution, incident/ops learning, stakeholder influence, and a high-stakes launch; quantify impact. - Be ready to map your examples to global coordination and consumer outcomes, not just code quality. - Show passion for sport/fitness or the consumer experience, and how that shapes your product and engineering decisions.