Did the VMware final loop in March 2026 for an SRE / platform eng role. They called it an "onsite" but it was fully virtual. Five rounds, roughly 4.5 hours including breaks. Here's the breakdown.
Round 1: Coding (45 min) Medium graph problem. They gave me ~5 minutes to read and clarify before I wrote anything. That structured start was clearly expected, not unusual.
Round 2: Coding (45 min) System-level coding. Not LeetCode format. I had to implement a simplified version of a watchdog process that restarts services based on health checks. Closer to a design-implementation hybrid than a pure algo problem. This was the most interesting round.
Round 3: System Design (60 min) Design a deployment pipeline for large-scale VM orchestration. They were testing if I knew distributed systems primitives: queues, idempotency, rollback, observability. No deep VMware domain knowledge needed.
Round 4: Behavioral (45 min) Two interviewers. Four to five STAR questions. High bar on specifics (see other posts in this thread). One question specifically about on-call or incident response. Relevant for SRE roles obviously.
Round 5: Hiring Manager (30 min) Less structured. More of a conversation. They asked what I want my next two years to look like, what I find frustrating about my current role, and gave me a lot of time for questions.
Timeline: Loop was Tuesday, recruiter called Friday with the verbal offer. Total time from first application to offer: 6 weeks.
Energy of the day: More relaxed than I expected. A couple of interviewers were clearly running between meetings but were professional about it. Nobody threw curveballs for sport.
One thing to know: They use Zoom for the virtual onsite and share a CoderPad link. Have your CoderPad settings ready before the round starts. Messing with font size for 5 minutes is not a great look.