Did my Verizon virtual final round two weeks ago. This was for a Senior Platform Engineer role on a network infrastructure team. Sharing the full picture because the onsite structure was not what I expected based on older posts.
Format: All virtual, 4 rounds back-to-back over about 4 hours with 15-minute breaks. No in-person component even for the NJ-based role, at least for this team.
Round 1: Technical deep dive (60 min). Interviewer was a Staff engineer. He picked a project from my resume and we went deep. Like, uncomfortably deep in a good way. Spent 45 minutes on one distributed caching project I'd done. He kept pulling threads: why Redis and not Memcached, what happened when the cluster had a network partition, how did we monitor cache hit rate, what would I do differently now. If you have resume projects, you need to own the details completely.
Round 2: System design (60 min). Covered this in another post but: geo-distributed, telco-specific constraints, think about availability over consistency. Prompt involved network monitoring at scale.
Round 3: Behavioral (45 min). Heavy on ownership and cross-team collaboration. Four questions, STAR format, they take notes. See my post history for the themes.
Round 4: Hiring manager / culture fit (30 min). Conversational. She talked about the team, asked what I was looking for in my next role, and left time for my questions. Did not feel like evaluation in the same way the earlier rounds did, but I've been told these rounds still matter.
Debrief timeline: They said 1-2 weeks. Heard back with an offer in 8 business days. Offer came from the recruiter via phone call first, then a written letter.
Offer for reference: Senior Platform Engineer, NJ-adjacent market (I'm remote), $148k base. They said bonus was target 10% but discretionary. No sign-on in the initial offer, I asked, they added $10k one-time. RSU-equivalent was a deferred comp structure, not publicly traded equity. Smaller than FAANG but the WLB signals I got from the team sounded real.
Ask me anything.