went through the WBD software engineer interview process earlier this year for a backend role on their streaming infrastructure side (Max platform team). figured i'd write it up since there's almost nothing out there.
Timeline was about 5 weeks start to finish, which honestly felt pretty normal for a company this size.
Stage 1: recruiter screen standard 30 min call. they asked about background, why WBD, and a loose sense of my leveling expectations. recruiter was friendly, gave a decent overview of the team. no technical content here.
Stage 2: hiring manager screen 45 min with the hiring manager. half of it was a technical conversation about system design at a high level (nothing formal, just "how would you think about X"). the other half was behavioral. they specifically asked about handling ambiguous projects and cross-team dependencies. felt like they were probing for someone who can work with non-eng stakeholders.
Stage 3: online assessment HackerRank, 90 minutes, 2 problems. one was medium difficulty graph traversal, the other was a string manipulation problem i'd put at easy-medium. no tricks. timed well if you're comfortable with standard leetcode patterns.
Stage 4: virtual onsite four rounds spread across two days: coding round (1 hour): two medium leetcode-style problems, one on arrays/hashmaps, one on trees. interviewers were collaborative, not hostile. system design round (1 hour): more on this in a separate post behavioral round (45 min): STAR format, asked about a time i disagreed with a technical decision and a time i delivered under pressure hiring manager closing conversation (30 min): mostly Q&A, culture fit
I got an offer. L4 equivalent in NYC. total comp came in around $195k all-in for 2026 (base + bonus + equity vesting). not FAANG-level but not bad for a media company. equity is RSUs, 4-year vest.
skip the leetcode hard grind for this one. mediums are plenty.