Did an eBay onsite for a senior infrastructure role last month. Going to lay out the full structure because the prep guides I found were either vague or outdated.
Format Full virtual onsite. 5 rounds back-to-back with 5-10 minute breaks. Total about 5.5 hours. They were punctual. Coding round 1 (45 min): Algorithm/data structures Coding round 2 (45 min): Algorithm with a twist System design (60 min): Full distributed systems design Behavioral / leadership (45 min): STAR-format, multiple questions Hiring manager chat (30 min): Not explicitly an eval but it kind of is
Energy management Seriously underrated. By round 4 I was running low. I should have eaten more between breaks. The behavioral round comes late in the day and if you're mentally drained your stories get sloppy.
The hiring manager round This one surprised me. People think it's a formality. It's not. The HM was asking about how I think about trade-offs in infra work, how I communicate incidents to non-technical stakeholders, and what kind of team culture I help create. It felt like the behavioral round but with higher signal weight because the HM is usually the final decision-maker in the debrief.
The debrief timeline I asked the recruiter. She said debrief usually happens within 2-3 business days of the onsite and they aim to get back to candidates within a week. I got my decision call 6 days after my onsite, which tracks.
What tripped people up (what I heard from the recruiter) Not asking clarifying questions in coding rounds. Designing without considering operational concerns (monitoring, alerting, rollback) in system design. Giving team-level credit in behavioral rounds instead of personal examples.
Overall the loop felt fair. The questions were hard but not gotcha-hard.