got a recruiter ping from WBD for a backend SWE role on their streaming infrastructure team (the Max platform side). interview in about 3 weeks. would love to hear from people who've been through their engineering loop recently.
specifically: how many rounds? is there a take-home or is it all live? what does the systems design round look like? any recurring themes (video streaming, CDNs, recommendation systems)? how much does behavioral stuff weigh vs technical in the final debrief?
i'm not a new grad so i've been through plenty of loops, just want to calibrate for this one specifically. drop whatever you know.
4 replies
corp_refugee
did a loop for a staff eng role on their data platform side about 6 months ago. 5 rounds: recruiter, HM, two tech rounds (one coding, one systems design), and a behavioral/values round with a senior director. no take-home at staff level, all live. coding was leetcode medium-ish, not hard. systems design was 'design a video recommendation system at scale' which is very WBD.
quietquit_quincy
useful, thanks. 'design a video recommendation system at scale' is exactly the kind of thing i can prep. did they care about cold start problem or was it more high-level infra?
corp_refugee
both, honestly. started high level then dove into cold start and how you'd handle a new subscriber with zero watch history. they also asked about A/B testing infrastructure for the recommendation model, which i wasn't expecting. more depth than i anticipated.
staff_steph
behavioral stuff mattered a lot in my WBD loop, more than i expected for a tech role. specifically: how do you work across teams with different priorities. the Discovery/WBD merger left a lot of competing fiefdoms. they're hiring people who can navigate that, not people who need a clean org chart.