Got through the recruiter screen for a senior SWE role and the technical panel is coming up in 3 weeks. trying to calibrate my prep properly.
What have people seen recently in terms of: coding format (hackerrank style, or live collab in their own tool, or something else) system design flavor: is it distributed systems or do they lean toward product/frontend-ish system design behavioral: is this the whole Amazon 14-principles thing or lighter touch
any data points helpful. I'm fine at algos but I genuinely don't know which direction to lean the system design prep and that's where I want to spend my time.
3 replies
frontend_fran
I went through their loop about 4 months ago (front-end focused). coding was a live collab session, not a take-home. they use their own tool obviously which is kind of fun but also a little meta. the coding problems weren't hard algorithmically but they wanted me to talk through edge cases and asked what I'd test. no leetcode-grind-tier problems.
staff_steph
system design at Figma tends to tilt toward: real-time collaboration, state sync, conflict resolution, multiplayer document models. if you know anything about operational transform or CRDTs even at a high level that's worth brushing up on. not required but it'll come up if you get a senior+ loop.
backend_bekah
behavioral was lighter than I expected. definitely not STAR-for-every-answer intensity. more conversational, they wanted to understand how I approach ambiguity and how I collaborate with design. made sense given the product.