applied to a Staff SWE role on the hybrid team in Austin. here's the timeline and what hit:
Round 1: recruiter screen, 30 min. pretty standard. she told me upfront it was 5 rounds total. i respect the honesty.
Round 2: online coding assessment via HackerRank. 3 problems, 90 minutes. medium difficulty, nothing crazy. one DP problem that I'd call LeetCode medium-hard. got through 2.5 of them.
Round 3: 'technical interview' with two engineers. one systems design question (design a notification service for a distributed system), one coding question done live on a shared IDE. no autocomplete, which is fine if you're used to it.
Round 4 + 5: back-to-back behavioral panels, each 45 minutes, each with a different IBM manager. this is where the process gets interesting. both panels were fully STAR-format, no technical at all. they asked things like: 'tell me about a time you had to influence without authority' and 'describe a project where you had to work across geographies and time zones.'
the second one was clearly looking at cultural fit in IBM's 'growth mindset' framework. they literally referenced IBMer values by name.
what surprised me: the behavioral rounds were harder to fake than the coding. they have a rubric and they follow it. if you ramble without structure you can tell they're not writing anything down.
offer came back Band 7. total timeline was 5.5 weeks from application to verbal offer.