finished my Discord loop about 5 weeks ago. sharing what I remember while it's still fresh.
recruiter screen was pretty standard, 30 min, mostly role-fit and timeline questions. then a 45 min technical screen with a mid-level LC problem (graph traversal, BFS variant). they were pretty chill about asking questions during the problem, which I took as a good sign.
onsite was 4 back-to-back sessions over a day and a half: coding (medium LC, sliding window + a follow-up on complexity) system design (design a real-time presence indicator system at Discord scale. millions of concurrent users, sub-second freshness. this one went 75 minutes and felt more like a senior-level question) behavioral (2 interviewers, about 50 min total. very focused on belonging and psychological safety, which is genuinely their thing) cross-functional (how do you work with PMs when priorities shift? how do you handle pushback from stakeholders?)
the system design round caught me off guard with how deep it went. they wanted trade-off discussion on WebSocket vs SSE vs polling, how you handle node failures, how you fan out presence updates efficiently. not just a whiteboard sketch.
behavioral was the warmest of the rounds. interviewers clearly cared about the answers, not just checking boxes. the "belonging" culture thing is real, not just a poster on the wall.
still waiting on the decision. no ghosting so far which, honestly, is already a good sign relative to my other pipelines.