Fidelity Investments · Primly Community

Fidelity Investments software engineer interview process, full loop: what actually happened

staff_steph · 6 replies

went through the full fidelity SWE loop earlier this year for a mid-level backend role in Durham. writing this up because the existing info out there is pretty thin.

stage 1 was a recruiter screen, maybe 20 minutes. standard stuff: background, why fidelity, basic eligibility. recruiter was friendly and moved fast.

stage 2 was a HackerRank OA. two coding problems, 90 minutes. one graph/BFS problem, one string manipulation. not too bad if you've been grinding lately. they give you a few days to schedule it.

stage 3 was what they call a "technical phone screen" with an engineer. 45 minutes. they gave me a medium-ish leetcode style problem in a shared editor (coderpad I think) and we talked through it together. the interviewer was genuinely engaged, not just waiting for me to finish. then maybe 10 minutes of questions about my distributed systems background. felt more conversational than a lot of screens I've done.

stage 4 was the virtual onsite. four rounds back to back over about 3.5 hours. here's the breakdown: coding: one more algorithmic problem, medium difficulty, plus a small design question layered on top system design: 45 minutes (I'll write a separate post on this one) behavioral: 30-40 minutes, classic STAR territory, focused a lot on ownership and how I handle ambiguity hiring manager chat: this felt lighter, more about team fit and what I wanted to work on

turnaround after the onsite was about 10 business days, which felt long but the recruiter kept me updated at the 5-day mark without me having to ask, which was appreciated.

total time from first screen to offer: just under 5 weeks.

a few things that felt distinctly Fidelity vs. my fintech/FAANG experience: they care a lot about financial domain knowledge, or at least signal that you care about it. I don't have a finance background but I'd done some reading on how brokerage systems work and that came up naturally and went over well. the behavioral round leaned heavily on situations where you had to navigate ambiguity or push back on product. I had three solid stories ready and used all three. the team I was interviewing for works on trading infrastructure, so reliability and latency questions came up more than I expected in the system design. not just "how do you scale" but "what happens when this is down for 30 seconds during market hours".

happy to answer specific questions.

6 replies

visa_vik

this is exactly what I needed. did the visa/sponsorship question come up during the recruiter call or later? I'm on H1B and trying to figure out which companies to prioritize right now.

backend_bekah

recruiter asked at the very start of the first call. Fidelity does sponsor H1B transfers but they said new cap-subject filings are case by case depending on the specific role and team. worth asking your recruiter directly and getting something in writing early so you're not 4 rounds in before finding out.

market_realist

5 weeks start to finish actually sounds reasonable compared to what I've been seeing at other financial services shops. some of these places take 8-10 weeks and ghost you after round 3. did you negotiate the offer at all?

careerveteran

the "what happens when this is down during market hours" framing is such a good signal about company culture. that tells you what their on-call is actually like and what they'll hold you accountable for. did they go into SLA expectations or incident response at all during the hiring manager round?

backend_bekah

yeah the HM touched on it. they have a tiered on-call setup and the team I was looking at was P1 support during US market hours, which is 9:30-4pm ET. after that it's shared rotation. not as brutal as I expected honestly.

newgrad_neil

do you think the process is similar for new grads or entry-level roles? I've been applying but haven't heard back yet and trying to figure out if the OA difficulty is about the same.