applied for a mid-senior backend role at Paramount (streaming/platform team, NYC) in early 2026. here's the full picture on the coding side of their process.
stage 1: online assessment they send a HackerRank OA first. two problems, 90 minutes. when i took it: problem 1 was a medium-difficulty array manipulation. think sliding window or prefix sums, not graph theory. straightforward if you've done any leetcode prep. problem 2 was slightly harder, closer to medium-hard. had a graph component, something like finding connected components or shortest path with some constraints.
there's no proctoring camera but they do use plagiarism detection. i just did mine normally. got through both with about 20 minutes to spare.
stage 2: live coding round (phone screen) if you pass the OA, next is a 45-minute live coding screen, usually with a junior or mid-level SWE. they use CoderPad. one problem, time for discussion. mine was a tree traversal variant with a follow-up asking me to optimize space complexity. the interviewer was helpful when i was thinking out loud but didn't give away the answer.
stage 3: onsite coding (2 rounds) the full onsite has two more coding rounds. one felt like a second medium problem (string processing, something about parsing log lines). the other was more open-ended: given a stream of user events, find the N most-viewed content items in the last X minutes. they wanted a clean implementation and then discussion of how you'd scale it. i did a heap + sliding window approach.
overall difficulty: medium, with one medium-hard problem in the OA. not LeetCode hard frequency. if you can comfortably solve 3 mediums in 2 hours, you're fine. they're not trying to stump you, they want to see clean code and real reasoning.
time to hear back from OA submission was 5 business days in my case.