went through the full charles schwab swe loop earlier this year for a mid-level backend role, westlake tx. figured i'd write it up since the info online is pretty sparse.
the whole thing took about 5 weeks from recruiter outreach to offer, which felt reasonable for a company this size.
stages: recruiter phone screen (30 min) - basic fit, comp expectations, timeline. very standard. online assessment via HackerRank - two coding problems, 90 minutes. more on this below. hiring manager intro call (45 min) - technical background questions, project walkthrough, some soft stuff. not super intense but they were probing for your ability to explain trade-offs. virtual onsite (4 hours across panels) - two coding rounds, one system design, one behavioral.
the interviewers were mostly friendly. a couple were clearly more seasoned than others. one of the panels felt like the interviewer was reading off a script, which was a little awkward, but whatever.
biggest thing: schwab is a financial services company and they care a lot about reliability, compliance awareness, and data sensitivity. even in system design, they'll ask about audit logging, role-based access, what happens when a transaction fails halfway. if you come in treating it like a pure distributed systems puzzle you'll miss the point.
behavioral questions leaned heavily on owning mistakes, navigating ambiguous requirements, and working with non-technical stakeholders. no "tell me about a time you disagreed with leadership" which was a refreshing change.
overall: not as leetcode-grind heavy as a FAANG loop, but not easy. definitely prepare your system design for fintech specifically (think idempotency, transaction rollback, not just throughput).
ask me anything, happy to share more detail on any stage.