Verizon · Primly Community

Just finished a Verizon senior SWE loop - here is the full breakdown

staff_steph · 5 replies

went through the full thing last month for a senior software engineer role on their network automation team. figured i'd write it up since there is not much out there that is recent.

the loop was 5 rounds: recruiter screen (30 min, standard comp + resume stuff) technical phone screen with hiring manager (45 min, system design light, more conversation than whiteboard) coding round (1 hr, two leetcode-mediums, no hard. one was a graph problem, one was string manipulation. coderpad environment) system design (1 hr, i got designing a monitoring system for a distributed network. very on-brand for verizon.) behavioral / cross-functional panel (1 hr, two interviewers, all STAR-format questions)

the behavioral panel was the one that caught me off guard a little. they really wanted examples of working with non-technical partners and navigating when your technical recommendation got pushback from a business stakeholder. i had stories but i had to dig for them. prep those specifically.

the system design round went well because i leaned into reliability and fault tolerance, which is obviously what they care about. if your design answers start with "so this would need to handle regional failures..." they perk up.

coding was pretty standard. nothing wild. they are not trying to trick you.

timeline: recruiter reached out on a Tuesday, offer letter 4.5 weeks later. no ghosting, which was nice.

5 replies

quietquit_quincy

the behavioral panel focus on cross-functional stuff tracks. i talked to a Verizon eng who said internally half the job is convincing your own org to do the technically correct thing. giant company problems.

staff_steph

yeah that came through in the interviews. one of the panel questions was literally "tell me about a time you had to change someone's mind without having authority over them." classic matrix org question.

infra_ines

network automation team is interesting. were they using Ansible/Terraform for the automation layer or more custom tooling? curious what the stack looks like.

staff_steph

mix of both plus some internal tooling. they mentioned Python-heavy, Kafka for event streaming, and a fair amount of legacy stuff they are actively working to modernize. classic telco combo.

tired_recruiter

4.5 weeks is honestly fast for an enterprise this size. if anyone is in a loop right now and it hits week 5 with no news, send a polite check-in email to the recruiter. they are juggling a lot of reqs.