English for software engineers: the words, phrases and situations that matter
Built from WordSlick’s software engineer role pack: the vocabulary you must be able to say (not just recognise), the phrases that carry a meeting or an interview, and the situations you can rehearse with the AI tutor.
Situations to rehearse
Technical interview
A video interview for a senior engineer role. You talk to the hiring manager. Goal: Explain a past project and handle two follow-up questions clearly.
Daily stand-up
Your team stand-up; you are blocked on another team. You talk to the scrum master. Goal: Report progress, name the blocker and ask for help in under a minute.
Architecture review
A design review where a sceptical architect challenges your proposal. You talk to a sceptical architect. Goal: Defend one trade-off and concede one point gracefully.
The deadline slips
A one-to-one with a product manager who expected the feature this week. You talk to the product manager. Goal: Explain the delay, own it, and propose a new date.
Incident call
A live incident bridge with a customer-facing outage. You talk to the incident commander. Goal: Give a clear status update and the next action.
Phrases that carry the conversation
- “I would push back on that because…”
- “The trade-off here is…”
- “There is a dependency we have not accounted for…”
- “Could you clarify the expected timeline?…”
- “Based on the data, I recommend…”
- “Let me walk you through the architecture…”
- “We hit a blocker on…”
- “The root cause turned out to be…”
- “I am not comfortable committing to that estimate…”
- “What does success look like for this?…”
Interview questions to practise out loud
- Tell me about a system you designed and one decision you would change.
- Describe a production incident you handled. What was the root cause?
- How do you decide when to refactor and when to ship?
- Tell me about a disagreement with a colleague about a technical approach.
- Walk me through how you would scale this service tenfold.
- How do you communicate a slipped deadline to a stakeholder?
Tip: answer each question in under 90 seconds with one concrete example (situation, what you did, the result). Record it, listen once, and say it again. The second take is always better.
Vocabulary to own (30 words)
- trade-off
- dependency
- latency
- throughput
- scalability
- bottleneck
- rollback
- deployment
- outage
- root cause
- workaround
- refactor
- technical debt
- backlog
- sprint
- stakeholder
- requirement
- estimate
- deadline
- constraint
- assumption
- edge case
- regression
- monitoring
- incident
- escalate
- prioritise
- blocker
- handover
- architecture
How WordSlick helps you prepare
- Set your moment as a mission: an interview, a meeting or a presentation, and its date.
- Daily sessions pace towards that date and bring these words and phrases into your practice.
- AskSlick plays the hiring manager and corrects you gently, explaining in your own language.
- You see an estimated readiness for the moment, based on evidence from your practice.
Questions
What English do software engineers need most?
Mostly speaking under pressure: technical interview, daily stand-up, architecture review. Vocabulary matters less than being able to produce clear, structured sentences in those moments.
How can I prepare for an English interview as a software engineer?
Say your answers out loud to the questions on this page, record yourself, and fix one pattern at a time (tenses, articles, “since/for”). In WordSlick you can set the interview as a mission with a date and rehearse with the AI interviewer.