i'm relatively early in my management career (about 18 months as a first-time EM) and i went through the HF EM loop in april. wasn't expecting to pass, actually, but i got to offer. wanted to share what the loop looked like because there's basically nothing online for EM-specific HF content.
the setup it's a 4-round process total: recruiter, technical, leadership x2 (one with an existing EM, one with a director). they explicitly told me there's no coding screen for EMs, which i appreciated. they're evaluating whether you can manage engineers building cutting-edge ML systems, not whether you personally can pass a leetcode hard.
technical round (60 min) this is a system design / architecture discussion, not a whiteboard. the interviewer wanted to talk through how you'd approach building a team that maintains a large open-source project with both external community contributors and internal stakeholders. topics included: how you manage priority conflicts between community requests and internal roadmap, release processes for a library with millions of downstream users, how you think about on-call and incident response in that context. it's less "design this system" and more "how do you lead the team that maintains this system."
leadership round 1 (with a peer EM, 60 min) heavily behavioral. questions i remember: tell me about a time you had to let an engineer go. walk me through the process and how you handled it with the rest of the team. how do you handle a senior engineer who's technically strong but resistant to cross-team collaboration? describe how you build psychological safety for an IC who just failed a project publicly.
they're probing hard on people stuff, which makes sense for a company where a lot of the engineers are either researchers or open-source-first types who can have strong opinions.
leadership round 2 (with a director, 45 min) more strategic. they want to understand your vision for team growth. i was asked about how i'd recruit for specialized ML infra roles, how i'd think about headcount planning in an environment where compute costs are a first-class concern, and how i communicate technical risk to non-technical stakeholders.
ongoing: the process felt genuinely thoughtful. they seemed to actually read my resume. offer was mid-$200s total comp, mostly cash, minimal equity compared to what you'd expect at a VC-backed startup.