Target · Primly Community

Target onsite / final round, how it really goes (did it virtually, Jan 2026, senior SWE)

frontend_fran · 4 replies

Did my final round virtually in January. Four rounds back-to-back over about 3.5 hours with a 15-minute break in the middle. Sharing the breakdown because I couldn't find a recent writeup.

Round 1: Technical / Coding (60 min) Live coding on CoderPad. Medium difficulty. I got a problem around optimizing a promotion discount stack (very retail-flavored). Interviewer was engaged and asked follow-up questions about time complexity. They didn't make me run the code but I offered to talk through test cases.

Round 2: System Design (60 min) Retail infrastructure framing. I was asked to design a notification system for order status updates at scale: package shipped, out for delivery, delivered, exception states. We talked through event-driven architecture, push vs pull, idempotency for retry logic, and how you'd handle a delivery partner API being flaky. Good conversation, not a gotcha session.

Round 3: Behavioral (45 min) Two engineers plus a PM. Got maybe 4-5 questions. Heavy on collaboration, handling ambiguity, times I'd pushed back on a technical direction. Classic STAR territory.

Round 4: Hiring Manager (30 min) More conversational. Why Target, what kind of team do I want to work on, what's my engineering philosophy. Some light probing on my background but mostly vibe/fit.

Debrief and decision took about 10 business days after the loop. I got a call from the recruiter with verbal offer, then written offer 2 days after.

Overall: organized, respectful of my time, not trying to trick me. The engineers were clearly experienced. If you've done any modern backend work and can talk through retail-adjacent system design you're well-positioned. The bar felt like senior at a solid company, not "pass leetcode-hard at 2x speed."

4 replies

marketer_mei

10 business days for debrief is actually reasonable, mine was 8. I expected way longer. They seem to actually close their debrief loops which is not universal.

content_cole

Did the verbal offer match the written? And did they give any room to negotiate between verbal and written?

sre_sol

Verbal matched written exactly. I tried to negotiate base by about 8% and they came up 3-4%. Equity grant they held firm on. Not a ton of flex but they didn't just say no flat.

director_dee

The PM in the behavioral round is not just there to fill seats. They're specifically watching for how you communicate to non-engineers. If your answers are code-heavy and jargon-heavy without translating, that's a signal against you at the senior level.