Introductions: "Tell me about yourself" and "Why us?"

Almost every interview opens with one of these. They are not small talk: they set the frame the interviewer uses for the rest of the conversation. Reviewed October 11, 2026.

"Tell me about yourself" in 90 seconds

Use three parts and stop:

1. Now: your current role and the problems you work on, in one or two sentences.
2. Evidence: one or two achievements that match the job, each with your contribution and a result.
3. Next: why this role is the logical next step.

I'm a backend engineer at a logistics company, where I own the routing service that plans about
40,000 deliveries a day. Last year I led the move from nightly batch planning to incremental
re-planning, which cut late deliveries by a third. I've enjoyed the distributed-systems side most,
and this role's focus on high-throughput event processing is where I want to go deeper.

Avoid reciting your resume in date order, personal history unrelated to the job, and anything you are not ready to be asked about in depth.

"Why this company?" and "Why this role?"

A strong answer is specific enough that it could not be pasted into another company's interview. Connect something concrete about the company (a product, an engineering problem, a published practice) to something concrete about you. Read the company's engineering blog, recent product launches and the job description before the interview.

Weak: "You're a leader in the industry and I want to grow." Stronger: "Your payments team writes about moving the ledger to an event-sourced model. I built the reconciliation pipeline for our ledger, and I'd like to work on that problem at a larger scale."

Exercise

Write both answers, read them aloud with a timer, and cut until each fits in 90 seconds. Ask a friend which single sentence they remember; that sentence should be the one you most want them to remember.