Finished the process for a senior platform engineer role in their AT&T Technology & Operations group. Took about 5 weeks start to finish.
Round 1: Recruiter screen, 30 minutes. Standard stuff: current role, why AT&T, visa status, salary range. She was efficient and actually prepped me on the process upfront, which I appreciated.
Round 2: Technical phone screen with a hiring manager. Mostly architecture discussion, not a coding challenge. He wanted to understand how I'd approach deploying containerized workloads across a hybrid environment. I talked a lot about Kubernetes on-prem vs. cloud, they run a mix. That resonated.
Round 3: Panel of three, two engineers plus a PM. Split roughly: 40% system design (design a monitoring pipeline for network telemetry at scale), 40% behavioral, 20% culture/team fit questions. The behavioral section was more structured than I expected, they had a rubric, you could tell.
Biggest surprise: they asked specifically about working within regulatory and compliance constraints. Makes sense for a telecom. If you've worked in any regulated industry, surface that.
Offer turnaround after the panel was 8 days. That part was faster than I expected given how slow the middle was.