Just finished a senior SWE loop at Samsung Research America (San Jose). Wanted to document the system design round specifically because I found basically nothing useful before going in.
The round was 60 minutes with two interviewers. One was my would-be tech lead, one was a staff engineer from an adjacent team. No presentation, just whiteboard-style on a shared doc.
Prompt I got: design a notification delivery system for a smart TV platform. Real Samsung product context, which I liked. They wanted me to handle scale (millions of devices), latency constraints for interactive notifications (on-screen alerts), and an async queue for background updates like app installs.
What actually mattered: They pushed hard on failure modes. What happens when a device is offline for a week? How do you handle message ordering on reconnect? They cared about data modeling more than I expected. Kept asking about what goes in the notification payload, TTL logic, schema versioning. IoT/embedded context came up. The interviewer mentioned they wanted candidates who understand constrained clients, not just web backends.
I have 8 years of backend experience, no IoT background, but I read up on MQTT vs HTTP trade-offs the night before and that came in handy.
Round was roughly: 5 min requirements, 15 min high-level design, 25 min deep dive on the queue + retry logic, 10 min failure scenarios and questions. Fairly normal pacing.
Leveling question I had going in: Samsung uses their own band system internally but maps loosely to L5/L6 for external comp benchmarking. Senior = their P4/P5 equivalent depending on the sub-org.
Happy to answer questions. This was Samsung Research not Samsung Electronics (the Korean parent's engineering division has a different interview structure entirely).