Cleared the VMware senior SWE loop in February 2026 for a role on the NSX networking team. Sharing notes on the system design round specifically since that's what tripped up a few people I know.
The system design interview was 60 minutes. One interviewer, occasionally a second who observed. The prompt I got: design a distributed control plane for managing network policies across thousands of hypervisor hosts. Pretty domain-specific but they explicitly said you don't need VMware product knowledge. They were testing architectural reasoning, not product trivia.
What they actually cared about: How you handle scale. "Thousands of hosts" was a stress test to see if you'd think about fan-out, eventual consistency, or leader election. Failure modes. They pushed hard on "what breaks first" and wanted explicit trade-offs, not hand-waving. APIs between components. I sketched a rough API contract for the policy distributor and they seemed to appreciate that level of specificity. They did NOT ask me to implement anything. This was pure whiteboard architecture.
Comparison to FAANG system design: Less focus on back-of-envelope throughput math. More emphasis on operational correctness. Things like: how do you ensure a policy change doesn't leave a subset of hosts in an inconsistent state? What's your rollback story?
Round ran the full hour. I got feedback afterward (rare these days) that the trade-off discussion was strong but I could have pushed harder on the consistency model earlier.
Level calibration: Senior at VMware post-Broadcom maps roughly to L5/E5 at other companies. They did ask one question about cross-team influence during the design discussion, which felt more like a staff screen. Not sure if that's standard.
Happy to answer specifics. This was for an infrastructure role, product-adjacent roles might have a different flavor.