went through the full NYT engineering loop earlier this month for a senior SWE role on their core platform team. sharing this because i couldn't find a good recent breakdown anywhere.
the process was five stages total:
recruiter screen (30 min): standard background call, nothing tricky. they asked about my current stack, why NYT, and broad comp expectations. recruiter was friendly and actually knew what the team was working on.
hiring manager intro (45 min): mostly conversational. the EM went through the team's charter, mentioned they're deep into modernizing the subscription + registration platform. she asked a few light technical questions (nothing you'd need a whiteboard for) and one behavioral: a time you influenced a decision without authority. i'd call this a two-way interview. come with real questions.
technical screen (60 min, via CoderPad): two medium-difficulty coding problems. first was a string manipulation / parsing problem. second touched on tree traversal. both solvable in ~20 min each if you're warm. no time pressure weirdness. interviewer was communicative and gave hints when i was stuck.
full onsite (4 rounds back-to-back, all video in 2026): two more coding rounds (similar difficulty, graph + array), one system design, one behavioral / leadership. total about 4.5 hours with breaks.
debrief / offer: feedback loop was about 10 days from onsite to verbal offer. not the fastest but not egregious.
overall calibration: NYT interviews are definitely easier than FAANG. the coding problems felt more like solid LC medium than the sadistic LC hard + follow-up combos you get at Google. the system design was the hardest part of my loop. behavioral round was real -- they care about collaboration stories, not hero narratives.
level i was targeting: senior, roughly equivalent to an L5 at a bigger shop. they don't use a public leveling system like Google does.
happy to answer specifics.