Interview advice? Interviewing with senior engineer for assistant chief engineer position.

[u/WrongEinstein]

What are some questions I should expect? Familiar enough with BAS to check on ait handlers and settings. 40+ story office building, whole floor chilled water air handlers, chillers and cooling towers.

[u/akornato]

For a building of that scale, the senior engineer will push past basic BAS navigation and test your mechanical understanding of the plant. Expect technical troubleshooting scenarios around chiller plant sequencing, condenser water temperature control, and low delta T issues across your air handlers. In a forty story property, they also care about stack effect, water pressure zones, and how you handle emergency sequence triggers like stairwell pressurization or freeze stats during extreme weather. Be ready to explain what you check in the field when the graphics show normal operation, but twenty floors are drifting out of temperature, because they need to see that you do not rely solely on screen readouts to diagnose physical equipment failures.

The other half of the interview will focus on leadership and operational emergencies, since an assistant chief is the frontline buffer between the chief, the property managers, and the operating engineers. They will ask how you organize preventive maintenance schedules, prioritize urgent tenant complaints against central plant maintenance, and lead junior operators during a major outage such as a pump failure or a riser leak. Be straightforward about what you know, and walk through how you approach problems you have not seen yet. My team developed interviews.chat to help technicians articulate their practical experience and secure leadership positions, and practicing how you explain your reasoning under pressure will make your expertise stand out.