i just finished my samsung new grad SWE interview process last month and wanted to post the actual playbook because the stuff i found googling was either 3 years old or too vague to help.
the process for new grad (austin and dallas offices, SWE track): online application or campus recruit hirevue OA (2 coding problems, 90 min) recruiter phone screen (15-20 min, basically just confirming basics) technical phone screen (45 min, 1 coding problem + some conceptual) onsite or virtual onsite (3 rounds: 2 technical, 1 behavioral)
the OA is medium difficulty on average. i got a graph BFS problem and a string manipulation problem. nothing too wild. just make sure your python or java is clean and you can explain your approach in comments.
the technical phone screen is where people get caught off guard. they don't just do leetcode. they also ask conceptual stuff: "what's the difference between a process and a thread," "explain what happens when you call malloc," "what's a race condition." cs fundamentals matter here more than pure algo speed.
the onsite: one round is heavy on data structures and algorithms, medium-hard on the LC scale but definitely not hard-only. i got a dynamic programming problem and a design-adjacent one about how you'd structure a cache. the second tech round had me debugging a small C++ snippet and explaining the issue, which i did NOT expect. know your pointers at a basic level even if you interview in python.
behavioral round: pretty chill. tell me about a team project. a time you had a disagreement with a teammate. they care a lot about communication here, probably because they're a big corporation and cross-team coordination is a thing.
for prep: i did about 6 weeks, mostly neetcode roadmap + the cs fundamentals questions above. also practiced talking through solutions out loud which helped a lot.
the new grad base i heard for austin is in the $105-115k range depending on exact role. not FAANG-level but not bad for cost of living there. good luck to everyone else in the grind.