i'm targeting a platform/data engineering role, not security-focused. my recruiter described it as a 4-round process but i've seen conflicting reports on whether there's a separate system design round or if it's folded into the onsite.
if anyone's gone through the loop in the last 6 months, especially for platform, data, or infrastructure roles, drop what you remember. round count, format, topics covered, anything. trying to calibrate how much time to spend on systems design prep vs behavioral prep vs security domain knowledge.
also: async take-home or live coding? i've seen both mentioned and can't tell if it varies by team.
4 replies
infra_ines
went through a cloud platform role loop about 3 months ago. four rounds. no take-home. live coding on the screen for round 2, medium difficulty, more about talking through the problem than getting it perfectly right. system design was its own round, 50 min, heavy on distributed systems and scale, not security-specific at all. behavioral got folded into the HM round at the end.
sre_sol
my loop last year for an SRE role was 4 rounds, same structure. the systems design question they asked me was about designing a high-throughput logging pipeline which, relevant to what they actually do but not secret sauce you need domain knowledge for. just normal distributed systems thinking.
de_derek
that's exactly what i needed to hear. i was worried they'd want me to design something specific to EDR telemetry. 'design a high-throughput logging pipeline' is completely in scope for me. thank you.
backend_bekah
i interviewed for a backend role about 5 months ago and also got live coding, not a take-home. round 2 was a pair-programming style session where they had me work on a real-ish problem while thinking out loud. felt collaborative, not interrogation-y.