Questions That Impress

"Do you have any questions for us?" is not a courtesy — it's the last scored segment of the interview. "No, you've covered everything" reads as low curiosity, and generic questions read as Googled. Strong questions do two jobs at once: they get you information you actually need to decide, and they signal how you think about engineering.

Questions that signal seniority

Prepare five or six; you'll get to ask two or three. The best ones are specific to a .NET + AI role at an agency:

• "Where is the team on AI right now — experiments, a pilot, or something in production? What's the next milestone?" — calibrates their maturity and shows you'll meet them there.
• "How do you evaluate AI features before they ship? Is there an eval or review practice, or is that something this role would help build?" — the single strongest signal question for this role; almost nobody asks it, and it's exactly the muscle you bring.
• "What does success look like for this position at six months? What would make you glad you hired me?" — turns the interview toward concrete expectations and gives you the rubric they'll judge you by.
• "What's the on-call and incident story? When prod breaks at night, what happens?" — legitimate self-interest that also says I expect to own what I ship.
• "What constraints shape technical choices here — data residency, procurement, accessibility requirements?" — in a public-sector room, this question announces you've worked (or can work) inside real constraints.
• "What made the last person in this role successful — or what got in their way?" — often produces the most honest answer of the day.

Listen to the answers. A follow-up on what they just said beats moving down your list — it proves the questions weren't a script.

Questions that hurt you

Some questions cost points regardless of intent. Anything answerable by the job posting or the agency's homepage ("so what does this department do?"). Leading with vacation, remote policy, and raises in a first round — legitimate topics, wrong stage; save them for the offer conversation, where you'll have leverage. Trashing their stack ("why are you still on .NET Framework?") — ask instead "what's the modernization roadmap?", same information, opposite tone. And asking nothing at all after a panel spent an hour with you.

Red flags

• Reading questions off a phone verbatim with no reaction to the answers.
• Only self-interested questions, nothing about the work, the team, or the mission.
• Asking something the interviewer answered twenty minutes earlier — proof you weren't listening.

Practice prompts

1. Write your own top-five list for a specific posting, ordered by which you'd ask if you only got two.
2. An interviewer answers the AI-maturity question with "honestly, we're just getting started." Compose your follow-up aloud.
3. Rephrase "why is your deployment process so manual?" into a version that impresses instead of insults.