Just wrapped up a Splunk SWE interview for a backend role on their Search team. 5 rounds over two days, all virtual. Here's the breakdown:
Round 1: Recruiter screen. Standard 30 min, mostly about why Splunk, comp expectations, timeline. She was fine.
Round 2: Technical screen with a senior eng. One medium Leetcode problem (sliding window variant), then we talked architecture for 20 min. She kept asking "what would break at scale" which I think was the real signal.
Round 3 (onsite day 1): Full coding. Two problems in 75 min. One was basically a graph traversal, one was more of a design-your-own-data-structure thing. I fumbled the second one initially but recovered by talking through my reasoning. They seemed to care more about the thought process than a clean solution.
Round 4: System design. I got "design a log aggregation pipeline that can handle 1M events/sec." Very in-their-wheelhouse, obviously. If you haven't thought through Kafka vs. Pulsar tradeoffs or how you'd handle backpressure, prep that.
Round 5: Behavioral. Two interviewers, 4 questions. Very structured, lots of follow-up. "Tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical direction" had about 3 layers of follow-ups. Felt like they were actually trying to figure out how I think, not just checking a box.
Got an offer. The behavioral prep mattered more than I expected going in.