Interviewed for a senior SWE role at PwC's products and tech group last month. I'm coming from a cloud infrastructure background at a public tech company. Here's how the system design component played out, since the PwC system design interview experience is weirdly hard to find.
They do have a system design round. It's not the full 60-minute whiteboard you'd see at Amazon or Google, but it's real. Mine was embedded in the technical interview: about 30 minutes after a coding problem.
What they asked: Design a system that ingests audit data from multiple client sources, normalizes it, and surfaces anomalies to auditors in near-real-time. Very on-brand for PwC. It's not a generic "design Twitter" question. They leaned into their actual domain: financial services, audit, compliance, data pipelines.
What mattered: Being able to scope the problem and ask clarifying questions before diving in. I asked about data volumes and latency requirements upfront, which seemed to land well. High-level architecture: ingestion layer (Kafka was well received), some normalization service, storage (they seemed familiar with both relational and columnar stores), and an alert/dashboard layer. Trade-off discussion. Why Kafka vs. something simpler. Why not just batch-process. The interviewer pushed back a couple times and wanted to see reasoning, not just a diagram. Reliability and auditability of the system itself. Makes sense for an audit firm.
What didn't matter: Hyper-optimized capacity planning. I did rough napkin math on throughput and that was fine. Nobody pulled out a calculator.
If you're interviewing at senior level and coming from big tech: the system design bar is real but calibrated to professional services problems, not FAANG-scale. Strong communication about trade-offs matters more than getting to the "right" answer.