HP · Primly Community

Went through the HP SWE loop for a cloud platform role, here's what happened

backend_bekah · 4 replies

Finished my HP loop about six weeks ago for a senior SWE role on their cloud print infrastructure team. Sharing what I saw because I couldn't find much recent info when I was prepping.

Round structure: Recruiter screen (30 min, mostly resume walkthrough and "why HP") Hiring manager call (45 min, pretty conversational, asked about distributed systems background) Technical screen 1: coding, two LeetCode-style problems, both medium, one was a graph traversal variant Technical screen 2: system design. I got "design a notification delivery system for a fleet of printers." Niche, but actually pretty interesting. They cared more about fault tolerance than pure scale Behavioral panel: 3 people, 1 hour. Heavy STAR format. Questions about cross-team conflict, delivering under ambiguity, customer impact

What surprised me: the behavioral panel was taken seriously. Not just checkbox questions, they really probed my follow-up examples. The system design interviewer was also very collaborative, almost like a pair session.

What was meh: scheduling took forever. Each round had a 5-7 day gap and nobody proactively updated me. I pinged the recruiter twice. Both times they were responsive once I reached out, just not proactive.

Got an offer. Base was reasonable, RSUs vested over 4 years with a 1-year cliff. Didn't end up taking it but the loop itself was fine.

4 replies

visa_vik

did they ask about work authorization early in the process? i'm on H1B and trying to figure out if HP sponsors before i invest time in a long loop

backend_bekah

they asked on the recruiter screen, first call. i'm a citizen so they just moved on, but recruiter mentioned they do sponsor for senior roles. probably worth asking directly at the top of any call rather than waiting.

careerveteran

the behavioral panel being taken seriously tracks with what i know about HP's hiring culture, especially in infrastructure. they've been burned by people who could code but couldn't operate in a matrixed org, so they actually weight the behavioral rounds. if you're prepping, don't shortcut the STAR stories.

sre_sol

"design a notification system for printers" is genuinely funnier than any system design prompt i've gotten at a company that calls itself innovative. respect though, fault tolerance on a physical device fleet is a real problem.