Just finished the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure software engineering loop (L5 equivalent, Austin team). Here's what actually happened:
Round 1: Recruiter screen, 30 mins. Standard background stuff, she asked about my distributed systems experience specifically. OCI is not shy about wanting cloud infrastructure background.
Round 2: Technical phone screen with an IC. One coding problem, graph traversal, medium-ish. Took about 35 mins. Then 15 mins of system design lite: 'how would you design a rate limiter?' They weren't looking for full-blown architecture, just wanted to see if I knew about token bucket vs sliding window tradeoffs.
Rounds 3-6: Virtual onsite over two days. Two coding rounds, one system design, one behavioral. Coding was cleaner than I expected, not the trick-question stuff. System design was 'design a distributed object storage service,' very on-brand for OCI. They pushed on consistency models and how you'd handle node failures. The behavioral round had a lot of 'describe a time you pushed back on a product requirement' type questions.
Total timeline: 4 weeks from first recruiter email to verbal offer. They were actually pretty communicative, which surprised me given Oracle's reputation for going dark.
One thing I did not expect: they asked about familiarity with Oracle-specific tech. I don't have Oracle DB background and it didn't seem to matter much for OCI, but if you're interviewing for database org roles you probably want to brush up.