Just finished the Sony Pictures software engineer interview process for a backend role on their streaming platform team. Took about 5 weeks start to finish. Sharing the full loop because I couldn't find much detail before I started.
Recruiter call (30 min). Standard screen. Covered background, why Sony, and what team I was targeting. Recruiter mentioned the team is split between Culver City and NYC, and they care a lot about candidates who can work across creative and technical stakeholders.
Technical phone screen (60 min). Video call with one senior engineer. One medium LeetCode-ish problem on arrays/hash maps, nothing brutal. Then 20-25 min of discussion about system architecture. They asked how I'd design a feature for content metadata at scale. Not rigorous whiteboard, more conversational.
Online assessment. Two coding problems, 90 minutes, HackerRank. One medium (BFS/graph traversal) and one easier string manipulation. Not timed per-problem. I finished in about 65 min.
Virtual onsite (4 rounds, one day). This was the bulk: Coding: Two algorithm problems, 45 min. LeetCode medium difficulty, one on dynamic programming that was tricky. System design: 60 min. I'll do a separate post on this one. Behavioral: 45 min with the hiring manager. Story-heavy. See below. Cross-functional: 30 min with a product manager from the entertainment side. Basically testing whether you can talk to non-technical people about technical decisions.
Offer timeline. Verbal about 10 days after onsite. Written a week later. They weren't super fast but the recruiter stayed communicative.
Overall impression: a notch below FAANG in process rigor, but not sloppy. The cross-functional round surprised me. I think it's specific to teams that interface with the studio side, not necessarily all SWE roles. If you're interviewing for infrastructure or platform, the mix might differ.
Feel free to ask questions below.