have a Sony SIE backend engineering loop coming up in about 3 weeks. trying to get a read on what's actually being tested right now, especially post the PS5 era hiring push.
specifically curious about: how deep does system design go at the senior level, are behavioral rounds scored with a rubric or is it more holistic, and has anyone gone through the loop in the last 6 months.
if you've interviewed at any Sony division recently, drop what you can below. role, division, rough timeline, format. trying to build a picture before i walk in.
5 replies
sre_sol
went through a Sony Pictures infra loop about 4 months ago. format was: recruiter, then a live coding screen, then a full virtual on-site with 5 rounds. system design was pretty standard for senior level. nothing exotic. behavioral was a full hour with two interviewers, they had a sheet they were filling out while i talked, so yes there is definitely a rubric.
infra_ines
SIE infra here, went through last fall. senior system design was a 45-min deep dive on a distributed media pipeline scenario. got follow-up questions on failure handling. not brutal but you need to be comfortable with the usual suspects: queues, caching, consistency tradeoffs.
remote_swe_42
this is exactly what i needed. failure handling specifically, do you mean they probed on what happens when individual components go down, or more end-to-end degradation scenarios?
infra_ines
both actually. started with component failure, then zoomed out to ask how the whole thing behaves under partial outage. the 'graceful degradation' question basically. if you can describe user impact at each failure tier you're in good shape.
brand_ben
not eng but went through a Sony design loop for SIE marketing design. portfolio review is very real, they spent almost 30 min on my case studies. culture fit questions were about how i worked with engineering partners. for non-eng roles at least, the behavioral stuff is conversational, not rubric-feeling.