just got scheduled for a senior SWE loop at VMware (platform/cloud team, remote). interview is in 3 weeks and i want to calibrate.
if you've been through a VMware engineering loop in the last 6-8 months, can you drop what you remember? specifically interested in: what the coding rounds actually tested (algo-heavy vs. systems/scripting) how behavioral rounds were structured (STAR? freeform? panel?) timeline from loop to offer anything that caught you off guard
i know the Broadcom acquisition changed some things so trying to get the freshest signal i can. appreciate any data points even if it was a rejection, that info is just as useful.
4 replies
backend_bekah
did a senior backend loop in january. coding was two rounds, both in Python. one was a pure algo problem (graph BFS variant), one was more of a "here's a broken API client, fix it and add error handling" type thing. i actually preferred the second one. behavioral was two separate rounds, STAR-format. panel had 4 people total across the day.
corp_refugee
went through it in october. timeline: recruiter screen to offer was 26 days. loop was 4 rounds in one day (virtual). system design went really deep into availability vs. consistency tradeoffs, more than i expected for a mid-size team. hint: if they're on a vSphere-adjacent team, having opinions about storage replication strategies is a differentiator.
market_realist
storage replication, noted. i have some background there from a previous gig, good to know it might actually come up.
director_dee
from the other side of the table: the behavioral rounds at VMware are not filler. interviewers are calibrated on what a "strong" answer looks like and they compare notes. don't phone in the behavioral prep. the teams care about cross-team influence a lot, prep stories about working across org boundaries.