Square · Primly Community

Went through the full Square SWE loop last month, here's what actually happened

backend_bekah · 5 replies

Just finished my Square SWE loop (backend, mid-senior level). Sharing because I couldn't find much recent info when I was prepping.

Rounds: Recruiter screen, 20 min, pretty standard. Asked about comp expectations early, which I appreciated. Technical phone screen with an engineer. One medium-ish graph problem. Not brutal, but they asked a lot of follow-up questions about edge cases and scalability. Be ready to talk through why you'd handle failures a certain way, not just what you'd do. Virtual onsite: 4 panels over about 4.5 hours. Two coding, one system design, one behavioral.

System design was the hardest part for me. The prompt was loosely "design a payment retry system" which is... extremely on-brand for Square. They wanted to hear about idempotency explicitly. If you don't say that word at some point I think they write it down.

Behavioral was focused on conflict and ambiguity. Specifically how I handled disagreements with product about scope. Have a real story, not a sanitized one.

Coding rounds were Leetcode medium but the interviewers asked me to optimize mid-solution which threw me the first round. Got the offer. Timeline was about 5 weeks total from first reach-out to offer call.

5 replies

remote_swe_42

that idempotency callout is real. got knocked for not bringing it up proactively in a system design round two years ago. their eng culture is pretty payments-first in the best and worst ways. did they ask about your on-call philosophy at all?

backend_bekah

not in the formal rounds but my future manager asked during the debrief call. i said i treat on-call as a reliability signal not a badge of honor and she seemed to like that. your mileage may vary by team.

infra_ines

5 weeks is actually fast for Block-era Square. i interviewed in 2023 and it dragged to 8 weeks with two scheduling reschedules and one panel who just... didn't show. glad they tightened it up.

visa_vik

did they sponsor visa for your role? i'm on H1B and trying to figure out if it's worth the process.

backend_bekah

i'm not on a visa so i can't say from my loop. the recruiter mentioned they do sponsor but i'd confirm with HR directly before getting deep into the process. don't take my word for it.