just finished my loop for a backend SWE role on the payments infrastructure side. sharing because i couldn't find much on the actual format for this division when i was prepping.
round 1: recruiter screen. 30 minutes, standard stuff. asked why finance, why JPMC specifically. did not ask anything technical.
round 2: HireVue. one coding question (graph traversal, medium difficulty), one system design lite question where you describe an approach verbally. no IDE, you type in a browser box. make peace with that early.
round 3: live coding with an engineer. two problems. first was string manipulation, pretty easy. second was a sliding window thing that got harder with a follow-up about edge cases under high throughput. they asked me to narrate throughout, which i was already doing, but worth emphasizing.
round 4: behavioral + technical deep dive with hiring manager and a senior IC. this round was 75 minutes and felt like three interviews stitched together. leadership questions, some design discussion about a past system i'd built, and then questions about how i handle production incidents.
the behavioral stuff was not lightweight. they asked about a time i pushed back on a technical decision and what happened. have a real answer, not a sanitized one.
took about 5 weeks total from first contact to offer call. the wait between round 2 and round 3 was the longest part, almost 2.5 weeks. recruiter was good about keeping me updated when i asked directly.