Morgan Stanley · Primly Community

Just finished my Morgan Stanley SWE loop. here's what the rounds actually looked like

backend_bekah · 4 replies

Wrapped up my loop last month for a senior backend role in the technology division. Sharing because there wasn't much current info when I was prepping.

Rounds: Recruiter screen - 30 min, resume walk, timeline, salary range sanity check Hiring manager intro - really a culture fit call, no coding. they wanted to know how I think about system reliability and incident response Technical phone screen - 1 LeetCode medium on arrays, then some back-and-forth about a past distributed system I'd built Virtual onsite (4 hours split across 2 days): Coding round: 2 LeetCode mediums, one was graph-adjacent System design: design a real-time trade notification system at scale. they pushed hard on consistency vs. latency tradeoffs Behavioral x2: pure STAR, structured scoring, two different interviewers

The system design was where I felt they differentiated. They don't want a generic 'shove it through Kafka' answer. They want you to articulate WHY and what breaks at what scale. Also the behavioral rounds here are not decoration. One interviewer literally had a rubric sheet visible on screen.

Timeline was 6 weeks start to finish. Offer came 8 days after the final onsite. Not fast, but at least they moved.

4 replies

sre_sol

the rubric sheet visible on screen detail is very Morgan Stanley actually. I heard they use a formal scoring system across all MS Technology interviews, something they rolled out a few years back to reduce bias. which is good in theory but also means if one round scores you low, there's less room for a champion to save you.

backend_bekah

yeah that tracks. my recruiter mentioned 'calibration meeting' a few times and it seemed like all the interviewers compared notes in a structured way, not just vibes. made me feel like the process was fair even when it was slow.

numbers_only

what level was this? and did they share a band or just a number when the offer came?

market_realist

6 weeks is genuinely one of the faster timelines I've heard for MS tech. I talked to someone who waited 11 weeks. the 8-day offer turnaround is the real anomaly, most reports say 2-3 weeks post-onsite.