Job interview in English for non-native developers…

You read documentation without a dictionary, write code review comments in English, and mostly listen on calls with colleagues abroad. Then an interview appears in your calendar where you have to do the talking for forty-five minutes. By the evening before, the main fear is no longer about the questions. It's that you won't understand the interviewer the first time and will go silent.

English gets checked at Russian companies too, right at the screening call. In the Sobes question bank, "What is your level of English, including spoken?" was asked at 8 companies, next to "How do you rate your English, and do you use it at work?" and "Will you be comfortable working with technical documentation in English?". Sometimes the recruiter switches to English for a couple of minutes after that. A full interview in English is built the same way as one in your native language. What changes is the preparation: you prepare specific texts, since "the language in general" can't be prepared in a week.

What to prepare

You won't raise your level in a week. You can prepare the things that are certain to come up.

Self-intro

A minute and a half about yourself, written down and learned close to the text. The structure is the same as in "Tell me about yourself" for developers: who you are now, what you did over the last two years, what you're looking for.

I'm a backend developer with six years of experience, mostly in Go. For the last two years I've been working on a payment service at a fintech company: I own the part that talks to banks. Before that I worked on internal tools. Now I'm looking for a team with a bigger product and more system design work.

Short sentences, simple tenses, not a single word to stumble on. That's the point. This is the only part of the interview you fully control, and it sets the first impression of your English.

Two stories

One about a hard task, one about a conflict or a mistake. These two cover most behavioral questions. How to build them is covered in the articles on a challenging task and on conflicts and mistakes. Write each one in English from the start instead of translating it. Translation drags in long subordinate clauses that are easy to get lost in.

Stack vocabulary

Twenty to thirty words and expressions you use to describe your work. What's usually missing is verbs, not terms: to deploy, to roll back, to migrate, to refactor, to troubleshoot, to come up with, to figure out, to run into a problem. Write them down and say one sentence about your project with each.

Separately, check the pronunciation of terms you've only ever read. The usual offenders: cache (sounds like "cash"), queue ("cue"), schema ("skee-ma"), integer ("in-ti-jer"), height and width, architecture with a "k" sound, Kubernetes, nginx ("engine-x").

Phrases that save you

To ask again:

Sorry, could you repeat the last part?

Just to make sure I understood: you're asking how we handled retries, right?

The second is better than the first. You restate the question in your own words, the interviewer corrects you if needed, and you gain a few seconds for the answer.

To buy time:

Let me think about it for a second.

That's a good question. I'd start with...

To admit you didn't understand:

I'm not sure I got the question. Could you rephrase it?

I didn't catch that word. Could you type it in the chat?

When you've forgotten a word:

I don't remember the exact term in English, but it's the thing that keeps old connections open and reuses them.

Describing a word with other words is normal, and native speakers do it too. Ten seconds of silence while you search for the exact term is worse. What to do when it's the answer you don't know, not the word, is covered in Don't know the answer in an interview?. The same three steps work in any language.

Pace and accent

An accent is not a problem. The interviewer is often not a native speaker either, or works with a team from five countries. Speed is the problem: nerves make people talk faster, word endings disappear, and you become hard to follow.

Speak slower than feels natural. A pause between sentences sounds confident.
Short sentences. One thought, full stop, next one.
Don't fix every grammar mistake on the fly. Nobody notices a missing article, but everyone notices a sentence started three times.
If the interviewer speaks too fast, ask: "Could you speak a bit slower, please? The connection is not perfect." It's an ordinary request.

Small talk

The first two or three minutes are about nothing: how you are, where you're calling from, the weather. For a Russian-speaking candidate this is unusual, and "Fine" followed by a pause makes things awkward. Prepare one line with a follow-up:

I'm doing well, thanks. It's already evening here, so this is my last call for today. How's your day going?

An answer, one detail, a question back. That's enough. The interviewer will move to business on their own.

How behavioral questions differ

At international companies the behavioral part is longer and more formal. Questions start with "Tell me about a time when..." and they expect a specific case with a result, not a reflection on how you usually act.

Two differences from the style you may be used to:

Say "I," not "we." In Russian, "we did it" sounds modest. In English, the interviewer can't tell what you did personally. "We decided to migrate, and I wrote the migration plan and led the rollout."
State the result directly. A modest "well, it turned out okay overall" translates as "nothing much came of it." Say what changed: "The release time went down from two days to three hours."

Questions about weaknesses and mistakes are also answered with a specific example and what you changed afterwards.

Translation in Copilot

If you take the interview with Sobes Copilot, it has translation: you can see the interviewer's lines and the assistant's answers with a translation. The language menu in the overlay lets you choose the answer language, the answer translation, the transcription language, and its translation. You can leave the answer language on auto, and it will follow the language of the interviewer's last line. Translation helps you not lose the question, but you still say the answer yourself, so everything above applies with it too.

How to rehearse

Record your self-intro on your phone and listen. It almost always turns out you speak faster than you thought and swallow the ends of phrases. Re-record it slower, three or four times.

Then run a full conversation. In the mock interview you choose the interview language, English included, and in voice mode the interviewer speaks aloud and you answer by voice. That's the closest thing to a real call: you have to understand the question by ear and answer unprepared. After the first run, write down the words you were missing and add them to your stack vocabulary.