did Samsung's virtual onsite three weeks ago for a senior platform engineer role. took 5 hours across a single day. want to give an honest picture because i went in with basically no intel.
structure (what i had): coding round 1: 60 min, 2 problems, shared coding doc, live interviewer coding round 2: 60 min, different interviewer, similar format system design: 60 min (already posted about this separately) behavioral: 60 min, hiring manager + skip-level team chat / Q&A: 30 min, potential team members, casual
break in the middle, 20 minutes, which i actually needed.
coding rounds specifically: the problems were medium-hard. one was a modified interval problem (merge with conditions), one was a tree traversal where you had to track path state. nothing i hadn't seen before but the live interviewer dynamic adds pressure. they didn't hint much. one interviewer said 'you're on the right track' when i wasn't sure, that was the only guidance i got.
team chat: this is actually more important than people assume. they're checking fit and curiosity. i asked specific questions about their platform migration (they're moving some services from on-prem to AWS) and the conversation got genuinely technical. the engineer i talked to seemed to enjoy it. don't use this as a venting session about past jobs.
pacing: a full day is draining. i scheduled the day before and after as buffer. by hour 4 my thinking was slower. just something to know.
timeline after: recruiter told me 'about a week' for debrief results. actual was 9 days. then verbal offer. not the fastest i've seen but not terrible.
overall the onsite was harder than i expected, more rigorous than some FAANG adjacent companies i've interviewed at recently. they seem to actually care about hiring precisely.