Going to write this out because I couldn't find a detailed Nike EM loop breakdown anywhere before mine, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time searching.
Context: applied for a senior engineering manager role on the Digital Consumer Experience team. Based in Beaverton. I have four years of management experience, manage a team of eight, and came in as a relatively strong candidate on paper. The process took about seven weeks.
Recruiter screen. Pretty standard. They wanted to know team size, how I approach performance management, and whether I was open to Beaverton relocation. (I was.)
Hiring manager call. This was a real conversation, not a checklist. He asked about a specific time I had to make a hard call on a low performer. I think this round is where a lot of candidates drop out without realizing it. They want to see you've actually managed performance, not just had difficult conversations that resolved themselves.
Technical breadth interview. One hour with a senior IC from the team. I expected system design or architecture whiteboarding but it was more of a calibration: can you hold a technical conversation with your engineers, do you understand what makes a good data architecture vs a bad one, do you know how to evaluate a PR without writing the code yourself. I talked about a migration we did from a monolith to microservices and what tradeoffs drove that decision. They weren't checking if I could code; they were checking if I could guide.
Panel behavioral. Three interviewers, maybe 15 minutes each, classic Amazon-style leadership principle questions. Nike doesn't use the LP framework explicitly but the questions felt like close cousins. "Tell me about a time you had competing priorities from different stakeholders" and "describe a time you had to give feedback that changed someone's trajectory." I prepared 8-10 STAR stories and used five of them.
Cross-functional interview. This one surprised me. Thirty minutes with a design director and a product lead. They wanted to know how I run eng-design-PM rituals, how I handle friction between eng and design, and whether I'd shipped something ambiguous successfully.
Bar raiser. Senior director from a different org. Asked about org design, how I think about headcount allocation, and what I look for when hiring senior ICs vs leads. This felt like an executive presence check more than anything.
Base came in at 195k. Total comp offer was around 255k with bonus. RSUs vested over four years. I thought it was fair for Beaverton but probably 10-15% below equivalent at a pure-tech company.
Biggest prep advice: have stories about managing humans, not just delivering projects. The technical stuff mattered less than I expected.