How to talk about failure in an interview

“Tell me about a time you failed.”

Few interview prompts make us all squirm more than that one. It feels like walking into a trap. If you admit to a real failure, you risk painting yourself as careless or unqualified. But if you dodge with “I’ve never really failed,” you sound naive or, worse, like you’re hiding something.

The reality is that failure is a universal part of building software — and building a career. At the senior level, especially, failure is inevitable. When you’re operating with bigger scope, higher stakes, and less certainty, you will make calls that don’t pan out.

Interviewers know this. In fact, that’s the point of the question. They don’t want to watch you squirm, they want to see how you process, own, and grow from setbacks. 

In other words, they’re not testing whether you’ve failed; they’re testing whether you can be trusted.

Why failure stories matter in senior SWE interviews

Think about the kinds of roles you’re interviewing for as a senior or staff engineer. You’re no longer judged solely on your ability to write tight, correct code. You’re expected to drive architectural decisions, set patterns for the team, and influence how others work.

With that responsibility comes a new reality: mistakes have ripple effects. A wrong call can slow a team for weeks, burn cloud budget, or damage user trust. Interviewers want to know that if  (when) those things happen, you’ll respond with maturity.

That’s why your failure stories matter. They surface the qualities that don’t show up on a whiteboard:

• Accountability. Do you own your decisions, or deflect blame?
• Judgment. Can you reflect honestly on what went wrong?
• Resilience. When things fall apart, do you crumble or adapt?
• Learning. Do you leave the experience better equipped for next time?

Handled right, a failure story signals that you’re someone who can be trusted with messy, high-stakes problems.

What kinds of failure to highlight (and what to avoid)

Not every failure makes a good interview story. Some are too trivial; others are too catastrophic.

Too soft: “I once forgot to push code to GitHub.” That doesn’t show much about you other than that you’re human. It doesn’t demonstrate resilience, judgment, or growth.

Too severe: “I introduced a bug that caused a multi-day outage and a customer lawsuit.” That’s memorable, but probably not in the way you want. Some failures are better left to your private career journal.

The sweet spot: Look for a story that was significant, but one you owned, corrected, and learned from. Something that shows stakes without disqualifying you.

For senior engineers, great categories of failure include:

• Technical judgment: an architectural choice that didn’t scale, or an assumption that didn’t hold.
• Leadership gaps: mis-scoping a project, overlooking a teammate’s needs, or under-communicating with stakeholders.
• Communication misses: spotting a risk too late, escalating too slowly, or not aligning on expectations.

These are the kinds of failures interviewers expect you to have faced and the kinds they want to see you’ve grown from.

Should you ever say “I’ve never failed”?

It’s tempting. Maybe you think admitting failure will make you look weak. Or maybe you’ve genuinely never had a major incident come back to haunt you.

But saying “I’ve never failed” in an interview is a red flag. To an interviewer, it reads one of two ways: either you don’t have enough real-world experience, or you lack the self-awareness to reflect on where you’ve fallen short. Neither interpretation builds trust.

A better response is to lean into the inevitability of failure. Acknowledge that engineering work is full of experiments, tradeoffs, and risks — and then share a story that shows how you’ve matured through those moments. That’s where credibility comes from.

The anatomy of a strong failure story

So how do you tell it in a way that builds trust rather than erodes it? Structure helps.

A strong failure story follows a simple arc:

1. Context → Set the stage. What project were you working on? What was at stake?
2. The failure → What actually went wrong? Be specific enough that it feels real.
3. Your role → Where did your own decisions or blind spots contribute? Don’t sanitize it.
4. The response → What did you do once the failure became clear?
5. The learning → What changed in your approach going forward?
6. The outcome → How have you applied that lesson since?

This arc keeps your story honest but forward-looking. You’re not wallowing in mistakes; you’re showing how you turn them into growth.

How to make your story land

Once you’ve chosen your story, keep a few principles in mind:

• Pick something with visible stakes.
• Balance vulnerability with competence: admit what went wrong, then show how you fixed it.
• Highlight systemic improvements, not just “I’ll do better next time.”
• Keep it concise — three minutes or less. Meandering feels evasive.
• Connect back to company values: ownership, transparency, continuous improvement.

Putting it into practice

Don’t wait until you’re in the interview hot seat to figure this out.

• Build a story bank. Prepare two or three failure stories across technical, leadership, and communication categories.
• Practice aloud. Your tone matters as much as your words. Sound reflective, not defensive.
• Get feedback. Ask peers or mentors if your story makes you sound stronger, not weaker.
• Stay flexible. One story can adapt to multiple prompts: “mistake,” “missed deadline,” “conflict.”

The more comfortable you are with your failure stories, the more naturally they’ll land in an interview.

Failure as a differentiator

At the end of the day, failure isn’t a liability in interviews. It’s a differentiator.

The candidates who try to dodge failure come across as less experienced, less reflective, and ultimately less trustworthy. The ones who can tell a story about failure clearly, honestly, and constructively stand out as the engineers you want on the hardest problems.

Because in the real world, things will break. The question is, when they do, can you be trusted to own it, fix it, and make the team stronger on the other side?

Get holistic interview prep with Formation

The Formation Fellowship gives mid-level and senior engineering job seekers everything they need to land their dream roles — including personalized skill brush-ups, resume help, unlimited mock interviews with experienced software engineers and hiring managers from top-tier tech companies, career and negotiation support, and more. 

If you’re having trouble navigating your job search on your own, apply here and get unconditional support from a team of engineering mentors, technical recruiters, career coaches, and more.