How Successful Software Engineers Answer 'Tell Me About Yourself' In Interviews

I just wrapped up my 2025 job search where I got 5 job offers as a senior software engineer. The most common question I got was "tell me about yourself" and while there's no right way to answer this, there are certainly better and worse ways.

In this post I'll share my system for answering this question and how I answer it in interviews.

How to Answer "Tell me about yourself"

The "tell me about yourself" interview question is less a test and more an icebreaker introduction. As such it's not really about passing a bar, more getting you talking and providing more context to the interviewer which can help guide the rest of the conversation.

There are a few ways for this to go horribly wrong and cause you to fail the interview so here are a few things to do to avoid these mistakes.

How to avoid instafails:

• Know your pitch - If you're stumbling over your pitch / unable to talk about yourself, it gives some early signal that you may not be prepared for the interview which in turn signals you may not be a strong candidate for the position.
• Don't lie in your pitch / resume - If what you say doesn't align with your resume, that can be early signal that you're lying. Anything you say / is on your resume is fair game for asking deeper questions about. So if you say things to pad your experience, be sure you can back that up with real world context. If you can't, it's going to again seem like you're lying which can lead to instafails.
• Keep it short - This is really just an icebreaker and the real test comes in the meat of the interview. If you take 5-10 mins to pitch yourself, that's time taken away from your test time. Some interviews do come down to the last few minutes so this could be the difference between passing and failing. In general your pitch should be less than 2 minutes. Sometimes the interviewer will step in to move things along, but that's not something you should rely on.

The pitch is also a good time to start setting expectations with the interviewer about your level, how you align with the company / position, and some strong roles / projects you want to talk more about. You can subtly hint at these things by providing years of experience, mentioning teams you were on, and listing projects that may be relevant.

Again this is a bit of an art because you only have 2 minutes to say everything but this is an opportunity to help guide the conversation towards your strongest areas of experience.

What to include:

• General overviews of your roles over the years - What the role was, what the main goal was, and potentially some projects / impact if you want them to ask about those. Think of these like links on a website - don't provide full descriptions of each, just enough info so the person understands what they can click into.
• Use descriptive words to describe your role - If you had a particularly strong role in a team or project you can hint at that by saying things like "led x", "built x from the ground up", or "team lead for y team". This doesn't add much more time but can again hint more at your role on the team.

Again more an art than a science and I don't always use all of these but can be helpful when crafting your own pitch.

My Elevator Pitch

My elevator pitch follows my resume. I prefer to go from most recent to least recent with a bit more info in the more recent ones and just a line or two on the least recent. I think this prioritizes the info most interviewers want to hear about - experience from the last few years.

If interviewers want to learn more about a different area then your pitch should give enough info for them to click into that. As an example, I frequently have interviewers who want to learn more about my time at Instagram vs my more recent time at Rippling / starting companies.

Here's my pitch as of my 2025 job search. It is a little dated as I have a new job but this is roughly what it looked like during my interviews.

• Rippling: Currently at Rippling on the Risk Engineering team where the goal is to fight fraud and keep people from stealing our money. I was the team lead for our Payroll products where I ran the Risk Policy Engine for our flagship US Payroll product and built a Policy Engine from the ground up for our new Global Payroll product. Together these systems protected tens of millions of dollars each week.
• HAMY LABS: Before that I took a year to try and start my own companies. I built a lot of things and had a lot of fun but never quite reached ramen profitability.
• Instagram: Before that I was at Instagram for 3.5 years working on Video Logging and Metrics. We were really focused on the accuracy, scalability, and robustness of our data pipelines and metrics for all of Instagram.
• APT / MasterCard: Before that I was at APT / MasterCard working on core services like authentication, async job queues, and killswitches.

Note: This pitch is my ideal pitch but it often fluctuates a bit as I don't really memorize this, just try to hit the main points. In general it's better for this to flow naturally than to sound like a robot / read off a screen and hit every single point (esp with these new cheating AIs everywhere).

My pitch touches on the things I want to present:

• Senior Software Engineer with 8+ years exp across multiple companies
• I have experience in big tech building robust platform / infra systems at planet scale
• I can move fast at small startups as a founder
• I can build as part of a team at startups / hyperscalers

Depending on the job, I will share more details about a certain position / project if it's relevant.

• If the company / role is doing metrics or scalability projects, I'll mention several porject from my Instagram Media Logging and Metrics days as I have several good ones that closesly align
• If it's an early stage startup, I'll talk more about HAMY LABS and the projects I've shipped on my own

Next

Interviewing is hard and can be scary but I think it's a skill anyone can learn and everyone can benefit from more reps. Hopefully this helps you craft your own elevator pitch and set yourself up for better interview outcomes.

If you liked this post you might also like:

• My 2025 Job Search as a Senior Software Engineer - Results, Timelines, and How I Study for Interviews
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