Fidelity Investments · Primly Community

Went through the full Fidelity SWE loop last month, here's the actual breakdown

backend_bekah · 5 replies

Just finished and got an offer, so posting while it's fresh.

Round 1 was a recruiter screen, standard stuff: what are you looking for, walk me through your background, comp expectations. Recruiter was nice but clearly reading from a template.

Round 2 was a HireVue. One-way video, 5 questions, 3 minutes each. Two were behavioral (describe a time you dealt with ambiguity, tell me about a technical decision you disagreed with), two were coding problems shown on screen (medium-ish Leetcode, one was basically a variation of two-sum), and one was a system design sketch in text. I found the format deeply awkward because you're explaining code to a camera with nobody there. Narrate everything.

Round 3 was the real on-site: 4 panels over about 3.5 hours. First panel was behavioral with my potential manager. She asked about cross-team conflict, a time I had to influence without authority, and my approach to technical debt. Very STAR-method expected.

Second panel was live coding, two 30-min problems. Both were graph traversal. Third was system design, they wanted me to design a transaction reconciliation service. Fourth was a culture/values panel with someone from a different team entirely.

The compliance angle came up a lot. They wanted to know I understood what it meant to build in a regulated environment. Mentioning audit logs, idempotency, and rollback strategies landed well.

Offer came 11 days after the final round. Timeline was slow but they did follow through.

5 replies

newgrad_neil

this is so helpful, thank you. the HireVue thing terrifies me. did you do a practice run or just go for it? and do they watch those videos in real time or is it really just an algorithm first?

backend_bekah

i did 2 practice questions first. they give you an option. and honestly no idea on the algorithm thing but someone moved me forward within 48 hours so a human definitely saw it at some point. just narrate what you're thinking, that part matters.

careerveteran

The compliance/regulated environment angle is real. I've seen candidates tank perfectly good technical rounds at Fidelity because they've never thought about what happens when a payment service processes the same transaction twice. Know what idempotency keys are. Know why exactly-once delivery is hard. You don't need to solve it from scratch, just show you've operated in that world.

visa_vik

11 days to offer post-final, that's actually reassuring. I've been sitting at day 8 after my final round and starting to spiral. does fidelity typically sponsor H1B for SWE roles? recruiter said 'yes generally' but that phrasing is making me nervous.

backend_bekah

I'm a citizen so I can't speak to that directly, sorry. But I did see someone in a Slack group say they'd gotten H1B transfers approved there. Might be worth asking the recruiter to confirm in writing if it matters for your timeline.