Applied for a backend SWE role on the brokerage platform team. Here's the actual sequence: Recruiter screen (30 min, totally standard) Hiring manager intro (45 min, more about team fit than technical, but they did ask about system design at a high level) Technical screen with a senior IC (1 hour, LeetCode-style but not insane, medium difficulty, two problems, they let you pick language) Virtual onsite: four back-to-back sessions. Two coding (similar difficulty to screen), one behavioral, one system design
The behavioral round surprised me. Not in a bad way. The interviewer was really specific in the follow-ups: "okay but what was YOUR contribution vs the team's?" and "what would you have done differently now?" They're clearly trained on STAR and they will poke holes if your story is vague.
System design was financial domain lite. Designing a notification service for trade confirmations. Nothing too wild but you need to think about exactly-once delivery and failure modes or they'll ask about it anyway.
Total timeline: applied, 3.5 weeks to onsite, offer 12 days after that. Which felt long but the recruiter was responsive throughout so at least I wasn't ghosted into the void.