Electronic Arts · Primly Community

went through the EA Mobile loop last month, here's what actually happened

mobile_mara · 4 replies

interviewed for a senior iOS role on one of the mobile games teams. sharing because i couldn't find much current info when i was prepping.

the rounds: recruiter screen, 30 min, very standard. asked about my timeline and visa situation (i'm a citizen, fwiw). take-home. 4 hours, they said. i clocked 5.5. it was a small game-state UI exercise, no real trick to it, just execute cleanly and handle edge cases. two back-to-back technical interviews on a wednesday afternoon. first was a live coding problem, pretty standard array manipulation. second was more of a "walk me through how you'd architect this feature" with a senior staff eng. that one was genuinely interesting. behavioral panel, 3 people, 45 min total. questions were not fluffy. "tell me about a time you pushed back on a product decision" came up, and they wanted real specifics.

the behavioral round mattered more than i expected. the technical bar wasn't punishing but the "player-first" culture questions were real. they wanted to see you'd actually shipped things people used, not just written elegant code in a vacuum.

took 9 business days from final round to verbal offer. comp was reasonable, not FAANG-level, more on that in the comp thread.

4 replies

newgrad_neil

really helpful, thank you. did they ask any low-level iOS questions (memory management, instruments, that stuff) or was it mostly architecture/algorithms?

mobile_mara

live coding was pure algorithms, no iOS specific. architecture session did get into threading and avoiding jank on the main thread, so definitely brush up on GCD and how you'd structure a game loop update. but no memory management gotchas.

careerveteran

the 9-day offer timeline matches what i've heard from people who interviewed at EA orgs recently. their coordination between hiring manager and comp approvals is slow. if you need to counter with a competing offer deadline, that's actually useful leverage here because it moves things.

sre_sol

"took 4 hours, i clocked 5.5" is such a universal experience. the take-home estimation problem is that every company is bad at estimating how long their take-home takes.