finished the Starbucks final round about three weeks ago. senior SWE role, distributed systems focus. sharing a detailed breakdown because i found almost nothing useful online before going in.
format for senior SWE: 4 rounds, all virtual (Microsoft Teams), scheduled across one day with 15-min breaks.
Round 1: coding (60 min) two problems. first was medium difficulty, sliding window variant. second was more interesting: a design-adjacent coding problem where they gave me a simplified data structure for a store menu and asked me to write queries against it in Python. felt like they were testing whether i understood the domain. i did it in Python, no issues. they don't care much which language.
Round 2: system design (60 min) already wrote about this in more detail in another thread. basically: design the ordering + loyalty system. high-level architecture, then they drill into specific components. the mobile app ordering infrastructure is genuinely interesting to design. not a trivial problem.
Round 3: behavioral (45 min) two interviewers, alternating questions. STAR format expected. they flagged they're specifically interested in collaboration and customer impact stories. i recycled one story too closely to what i said in round 2 by accident and they noticed. have at least 5-6 distinct stories prepped.
Round 4: hiring manager (30 min) more conversational. covered my longer-term career direction, how i think about tradeoffs in tech decisions at a broad level, and a few clarifying questions about things from earlier rounds. also covered team structure and roadmap at a high level.
debrief / decision: they told me 7-10 business days. i heard back in 8 days. offer came from recruiter on a call, not via email.
one thing i was surprised by: the whole loop felt more collaborative than adversarial. they wanted me to succeed. when i got stuck in round 1 they asked clarifying questions that were genuinely helpful nudges, not gotchas. made a difference.