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Accenture onsite / final round, how it really goes: three rounds in one virtual day

sre_sol · 5 replies

Had my Accenture virtual onsite last spring for a senior platform engineer role. Sharing the specifics since the format is a bit different from what I expected.

Format: three back-to-back virtual sessions, all on the same day. They gave me a 20-minute buffer between each. Total day was about 4 hours including the breaks.

Round 1: Technical coding. 45 minutes with a senior engineer. Live coding in a shared Google Doc, not a proper IDE. The problem was a medium-difficulty graph question (finding the shortest path in a weighted graph with some constraints). I was allowed to look up syntax. What they care about more than syntax is your thinking process. They interrupted me twice to ask "why did you choose that approach" which is actually fine once you expect it.

Round 2: System design. 45 minutes with a principal engineer and a manager. The prompt was designing a monitoring and alerting pipeline for a distributed microservices application. Very relevant for an SRE role, which made this round feel the most natural to me. We talked through Kafka vs. a simpler polling approach, alert routing logic, on-call runbook integration. More conversational than interrogative.

Round 3: Behavioral + leadership. 45 minutes with the hiring manager and an HR rep. This round had the most Accenture-specific texture. They probed hard on client situations: "describe a time you had to push back on a client request." They also asked about how I handle ambiguous project scopes, which is very consulting-ish even for a technical role.

Offer came 8 days after the final round, which felt reasonable.

The onsite wasn't the hardest I've done (not close to Meta or Google), but it was structured and they took it seriously. Come in with client-delivery examples ready even if your background is product engineering. It translates.

5 replies

backend_bekah

The Google Doc coding thing again. I will never understand why a company with Accenture's resources can't spin up a proper CoderPad environment. At least the 'why did you choose that' interruptions make the format less about syntax recall.

consultant_cam

The 'push back on a client request' question is one of the most important behavioral signals in a consulting firm. They want to see that you can hold a position professionally without torpedoing the relationship. Have a story where you pushed back and were right, and also one where you pushed back but ultimately deferred and how you handled that.

director_dee

8 days for offer timeline is actually pretty fast for a firm that size. I've seen big consulting shops take 3-4 weeks post-onsite because approvals route through multiple practice leads. Did you have a competing offer deadline that sped things up, or was that just their normal pace?

sre_sol

I did mention I was in final rounds elsewhere. I don't know if that sped things up or if they were just moving quickly on the headcount. Either way, worth mentioning if you have other timelines active.

market_realist

Did they give you any indication during the onsite of how they were feeling, or was it a straight poker face the whole time? I'm always trying to read those signals.