Just cleared the HP senior SWE loop for a cloud infrastructure role on the Hybrid Cloud team. The system design round was the heaviest part of the loop, so writing this up while it's fresh.
First: HP doesn't use the same leveling language as big tech. Senior here maps roughly to L5 at Google or E5 at Meta. They call it Band 5 internally, sometimes just "Senior Engineer." If you're coming from FAANG that context helps calibrate expectations.
The system design round itself
One hour, one interviewer (the hiring manager in my case). No LeetCode, no coding at all. Entirely design-focused. My prompt was something like: design a multi-tenant configuration management service for enterprise devices. Very HP-flavored, very product-relevant.
What they actually watched for: How I broke down requirements (they cared a lot about clarifying questions early) My instinct around data consistency vs. availability tradeoffs Whether I could speak to scale without making up numbers How I handled failure modes and recovery scenarios
I spent maybe 10 minutes on requirements, 25 on the core design, 15 on deep-dives they drove (auth model, caching layer, how I'd handle offline device sync). The last 10 were Q&A.
Prep that actually helped
Honestly the HP design problems feel closer to enterprise SaaS than they do to FAANG-style distributed systems. Think: device management, configuration sync, telemetry pipelines, print queue orchestration. Knowing a bit about HP's product surface area helped me speak to why certain tradeoffs matter for their domain.
I reviewed Designing Data-Intensive Applications for the consistency sections, did a few practice runs out loud, and that was about it. No grindy prep.
One thing that surprised me: they asked me to estimate storage requirements numerically. Not a hard calculation, but they wanted to see I'd actually reason through it. I fumbled the first number and they pushed back. Coming back with a revised estimate and reasoning recovered it.
Total loop was 4 rounds: one system design, two coding (medium LC difficulty), one behavioral. They ran it over two days. Debrief was 8 days after the last round.
Happy to answer specifics.