I just finished my VMware new grad SWE interview loop (class of 2025, applied to a product engineering role, Palo Alto/remote hybrid). Got the offer. Writing this because when I was prepping I couldn't find a single recent post that actually told me what the process looks like end to end.
Here's the full picture:
Recruiter screen (30 min). Behavioral only. Tell me about yourself, why VMware, a time you worked in a team. Very standard. They asked if I had a preference for frontend vs. backend. I said backend, that shaped which team I interviewed with.
Online assessment (72 hours to complete, two coding problems). This was through HackerRank. Both were medium difficulty. One was a graph problem (BFS variant), one was a string manipulation problem. 90 minutes on the clock once I started. I'd rate it: if you've done ~100 Leetcode mediums you're fine. Nothing obscure.
Technical phone screen (45 min, one interviewer). Coding in CoderPad. One medium problem, then a quick follow-up 'how would you optimize this.' Afterward about 10 minutes of questions about my CS fundamentals: Big O, when to use a hash map vs. a sorted array, basics of threading. Not deep, just checking that you know what you're doing.
Virtual onsite (3 rounds, one day). Round one was coding (two more medium problems). Round two was a kind of 'design for scale' discussion, but very simplified because I'm a new grad. They asked me to design a basic key-value store. No deep distributed systems expected; they mostly wanted to see if I could talk through tradeoffs at all. Round three was behavioral: conflict, failure, teamwork stories.
Total time from application to offer: about 6 weeks. The process is organized. They were clear about timeline at every stage.
What to prep: Leetcode mediums (graphs and arrays especially), Big O basics, one simple system design (key-value store or URL shortener level), and two or three solid STAR stories. That's genuinely it for new grad level. Don't let anyone tell you you need to grind Leetcode hards for VMware new grad.