Gating: Round 1 is pass/fail. Loop is Round 2, 3, 4 and then Round 5 is HM

Interviewer seniority: Round 1 was a Senior Engineer. Rounds 2 and 3 were both Staff Software Engineers — essentially peers to the role. Round 4 (System Design) was an Architect, two levels above Staff Software Engineer.

Note: this is specific to my loop and team — depending on which team is hiring, the process could be slightly different. Generally, whichever team you're interviewing for supplies the interviewers and makes the call.

Round 1 — Tech Screen (Senior Engineer)
Graph problem, topological-sort family, framed as a real-world dependency-resolution scenario rather than the textbook version. Expected to design the classes first, walk through examples, then code — and expected a full working solution with edge cases covered.

Round 2 — Staff Coding Round (Staff Engineer)
A concurrency-heavy design-and-implement problem: a shared cache/data-structure problem with a fairness constraint across multiple tenants (bounded capacity, eviction policy tied to per-tenant usage).
Similar to Design Questions on Leetcode with added complications.

Round 3 — Code Review & Debugging (Staff Engineer)
You're given a small project — a handful of files — framed as if a junior engineer had implemented it. As the staff engineer, your job is to code-review it: find the bugs, big and small, and speak to quality and design issues, not just correctness. Biggest lesson from this round: build a top-down mental model of the whole file set before diagnosing.

Round 4 — System Design (Architect)
Interviewer picked my past projects and went deep into tradeoffs and how I would design it differently under different constriants. Interviewer was really good.

Round 5 — Hiring Manager Round
Standard: Tell Me About Yourself, resume walkthrough, behavioral questions. Being a staff-level loop, expect a couple of questions on mentorship/leadership specifically.

Outcome: Offer extended, accepted.

Coding rounds ran on CodeSignal (shared editor); system design used an Excalidraw-style whiteboard tool inside the same platform.

Overall the experience was good — interviewers across the loop were sharp and genuinely willing to listen.