Went through the Square engineering manager interview loop earlier this year for a senior EM role on the Seller ecosystem side. Six rounds total. Wanted to write this up because I couldn't find anything current and had to piece together a picture from scattered posts.
The structure was: Recruiter screen (30 min, mostly career narrative) Hiring manager intro call (45 min, more conversational than you'd expect) Technical depth (60 min, with a senior engineer on the team) People leadership (60 min, two rounds, one with an EM peer and one with a director) Cross-functional influence (45 min, with a PM and a design lead) Bar raiser equivalent (they don't call it that, but there's a senior leader who specifically probes for calibration across loops)
The technical depth round for EM is interesting. They're not expecting you to grind LC. They want to see that you can dig into an architecture problem, ask the right questions, and know where the complexity lives. I got a distributed systems design scenario around payment processing reliability, which makes sense given what Square builds. You don't need to produce working code but you do need to be specific: explain tradeoffs, call out failure modes, talk about consistency vs. availability decisions.
People leadership is where most EMs either win or lose it here. They probe hard on hiring, performance management, and conflict. One panelist asked me to walk through the last time I had to let someone go and what I learned. Another question: describe a situation where your tech lead disagreed strongly with a direction you'd committed to. They care a lot about whether you actually listen or just manage down.
The cross-functional round is underrated. Square has historically had some tension between product and eng speed, so they want to see that you know how to partner without just being a yes-machine.
Total timeline was about 5 weeks from first contact to verbal offer. Debrief was thorough, my recruiter walked through each round's feedback category. Didn't get a ton of specifics but enough to understand where I landed.