eBay · Primly Community

Completed the eBay SWE L4 loop last month, here's the breakdown

remote_swe_42 · 5 replies

Finished the full loop for a backend SWE L4 role on the Payments infrastructure team. Timeline from recruiter reach-out to offer: 5 weeks.

Rounds: Recruiter screen (30 min, pure logistics) Technical phone screen with a senior IC: BFS/DFS problem on a graph, then 20 min of system design conversation about their payments pipeline Virtual onsite: 5 rounds across one day Two coding rounds (one array manipulation, one DP that I almost panicked on but recovered) One system design round: design a real-time bid/listing system at marketplace scale One behavioral round: 4-5 STAR questions, heavy on conflict resolution and dealing with tech debt under pressure One "architecture deep dive" where they asked me to walk through something I'd built

The system design round was the hardest part for me. They kept probing on consistency tradeoffs. Not trick questions, but they want you to know why you're choosing eventual vs. strong consistency, not just that you know the terms.

Behaviorally, every question had a "what did you do when stakeholders pushed back" angle. Leadership principles-ish but not as rigid as Amazon.

Offer came back 8 days post-onsite. Comp negotiation was fine, they had a range and met in the middle without drama.

5 replies

infra_ines

the bid/listing system design at marketplace scale is such an eBay question. did they expect you to handle auction closing logic or was it more the infrastructure layer?

remote_swe_42

mostly infrastructure. they wanted to see horizontal scaling for write throughput and how you'd handle the thundering herd at auction close. auction logic itself came up but wasn't the focus.

careerveteran

8 days post-onsite is actually fast for a company that size. the "walk through something you built" round is underrated as a signal opportunity. most candidates treat it as a formality. it's not.

jp_newgrad

how hard was the DP problem? like was it LeetCode hard or medium-ish? asking because i'm at the phone screen stage right now and trying to calibrate.

remote_swe_42

honest answer: the problem itself was medium but i overthought it and tried to jump to the fancy solution before the brute force. nail the brute force first, then optimize. they're watching your process.