just finished a senior backend eng loop at Coinbase. sharing notes while they're fresh.
recruiter screen: standard 30 min. they asked about distributed systems experience and whether I had any crypto context. I have fintech background, which helped. no real gotchas.
phone screen: one LC medium (graph traversal, nothing exotic), and then about 15 minutes of 'walk me through a high-scale API you've built.' the interviewer was clearly reading signal on whether I could discuss trade-offs, not just recite a design.
onsite (4 rounds, all virtual): coding 1: two mediums back to back, 45 min. one DP, one string manipulation. tight on time. coding 2: one harder problem but they gave hints, felt collaborative system design: design a real-time transaction notification system. they pushed hard on consistency guarantees and failure modes. this is where crypto context actually matters because they want you to reason about settlement windows. behavioral: 3 questions, all ownership and conflict. one was 'tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical decision and had to act on it anyway.' they're looking for how you hold the tension, not for you to say you won.
still waiting on the offer call but the loop itself felt fair. timeline was 3.5 weeks total.