I finished a Sony Interactive Entertainment onsite earlier this year for a senior frontend SWE role (PlayStation app ecosystem side). Here's everything I wish I'd known going in.
Format was 5 rounds over one day, all virtual via Zoom and Miro:
Round 1 (45 min): Coding. String problem, then a follow-up about handling unicode edge cases in a streaming context. Not super hard but the follow-up caught me slightly off-guard. Worth thinking about real-world constraints beyond the happy path.
Round 2 (45 min): Coding. Graph/tree problem. Comfortable medium territory. One of the easier rounds.
Round 3 (60 min): System design. Design a content delivery system for game patches (think 50-100GB downloads, millions of concurrent users at launch). This was clearly Sony-specific. I'd actually thought about this scenario before because it's interesting, which helped. They wanted caching strategy, CDN architecture, retry/resumable download handling.
Round 4 (45 min): Behavioral. Classic STAR questions, but they went deeper than I expected on two of them. Had to give a second example on one question when my first answer was apparently too abstract.
Round 5 (30 min): Hiring manager. Mostly a conversation. They asked what attracted me to game-adjacent tech and whether I'd worked on high-traffic consumer products before. Felt more mutual than evaluative at this point.
Lunch break between rounds 2 and 3. They actually gave a 45-minute break which was enough to eat and reset. I appreciated that.
Wait time after: 11 business days to verbal offer. Timeline felt slow but the offer came.
One prep note: read about PSN's actual architecture challenges. The 2011 outage, the launch-day queue issues for PS5. Knowing the real problems shows you care about their specific domain.