Verizon · Primly Community

Verizon senior / L5 system design interview, what to expect (2026 data point)

frontend_fran · 5 replies

Went through the full Verizon senior SWE loop earlier this year, NJ-based team with remote flexibility. Sharing the system design round specifically because I couldn't find much on it before going in.

The round was 60 minutes, one interviewer (the hiring manager for the team). No shared whiteboard tool, they sent a Google Meet link with no doc attached. I just opened a blank Google Doc and shared my screen. Heads up: ask in advance what tooling they expect or you'll be awkwardly arranging this at the start.

The prompt: Design a real-time notification delivery system for network outage alerts at scale. They wanted the thing to handle millions of subscribers, multiple channels (push, SMS, email), with priority routing for enterprise vs. consumer accounts.

A few things they cared about more than I expected: Exactly how I'd handle fan-out at scale (I went with a queue-per-channel approach, they pushed back asking about cost tradeoffs) Regional failover. Verizon's infrastructure is inherently geo-distributed so they wanted to see that I understood that a single-region solution is a non-answer here SLA tiers. Enterprise customers get sub-60s notification, consumer is best-effort. I modeled this with separate priority queues and they seemed satisfied

Leetcode-style coding was NOT part of this round. They had a separate 45-minute coding screen earlier in the process (I got a medium-difficulty graph problem, BFS-adjacent).

Level targeting: this was being hired as what Verizon internally calls a "Principal Engineer" which maps roughly to L5/Staff at other companies. The design prompt complexity matched that expectation.

Total loop was: recruiter screen (30 min) -> phone tech screen (45 min, coding) -> hiring manager call (30 min) -> final virtual onsite (3 rounds, same day). System design was one of the onsite rounds.

Happy to answer questions about any other round.

5 replies

sec_sasha

The geo-distributed angle is interesting. Did they get into specifics about their actual infra or was it more abstract? I always wonder with telcos if the interviewers want you to know that Verizon runs on AWS vs their own network or if that's irrelevant.

remote_swe_42

They didn't quiz me on their actual stack but the interviewer clearly knew a lot and steered the conversation toward on-prem vs cloud tradeoffs for telco. I mentioned hybrid cloud (some things want to live closer to the network edge) and that went over well. I don't think you need inside knowledge but showing you understand why a telco's constraints differ from a pure-software company helps.

sre_sol

Fan-out to millions of subscribers sounds like the kind of thing that's boring to design and brutal to operate. Did they get into observability, or was it purely the happy path design?

ae_andre

This is super helpful, saving it. Quick question: did they give you any resources to read beforehand or was it cold?

remote_swe_42

Cold. No prep materials from Verizon. The recruiter said "system design of a distributed system" and that was the full brief. They seem fine with you asking clarifying questions at the start of the round though.