Boeing · Primly Community

Boeing onsite / final round, how it really goes: four rounds, two days, one very long debrief wait

sre_sol · 4 replies

Completed the Boeing final round last month for a senior software engineer role in their digital transformation group. This is the part people ask most about and I couldn't find anything recent so I'm writing it up.

Format: Four rounds, done virtually over two afternoons (two rounds each day). They didn't do a compressed single-day onsite, at least not for my loop. I've heard in-person is still available for Everett and Renton roles but most engineering roles seem virtual now.

Round breakdown: Round 1: Coding. 50 min. Two problems on a shared editor. One was graph traversal (medium), one was a database modeling question (write a schema for a maintenance tracking system). Not brutal but not easy. Round 2: System design. 50 min. Already wrote up the design question in another thread. Tl;dr: design an aircraft maintenance scheduling system. Reliability and auditability matter more than scale. Round 3: Behavioral + leadership. 45 min. Four behavioral questions, all STAR format. Safety culture framing throughout. Round 4: Technical deep dive with a senior engineer. This was a conversation about my past work: what I built, what broke, what I'd do differently. No new coding. Just talking through real systems I've worked on.

What I didn't expect: Round 4 was actually the most interesting. They really probed on failure modes and incident response. 'Walk me through a production incident you owned' came up and they dug into it for 20 minutes. SRE background helped a lot here.

The debrief wait: 8 business days. That felt long. I followed up once at day 5 and heard back on day 8. The recruiter said they had a calibration process with multiple interviewers which tracks with the panel structure.

Offer came 3 days after the verbal. Whole thing from application to offer was 7 weeks.

4 replies

infra_ines

8 business days for debrief is almost reassuring because at least it's not ghosting. I once waited 14 days at a different aerospace company and was sure I'd failed. I hadn't.

numbers_only

Four rounds for a senior role is reasonable. What was the level they slotted you at? Senior SWE at Boeing, curious what the TC looked like in your geo.

sre_sol

Remote. My offer was senior SWE equivalent, base came in around $145k plus a modest bonus target (10-15%). Equity is basically nil compared to tech companies. Total package is lower than FAANG but the stability tradeoff is real and I wanted it.

marketer_mei

The 'walk me through a production incident you owned' question is one I wish more companies used. You learn so much more about how someone actually thinks than you do from LeetCode. Good signal that Boeing asks it.