CrackingWalnuts
Real production experience now. LLD becomes a real round. Coding is faster and tougher. Behavioral stories shift from school work to features you actually shipped.
Own a feature end to end, design a single service, and reason about data and APIs.
Salary is approximate market context, not a promise. It varies a lot by country, company, and year.
Can you actually do this?
If one makes you hesitate, that is the gap. Open it to go learn it.
Usually 2 rounds. LeetCode medium is the bar. Faster and cleaner than new grad. Talk through trade-offs.
1 round at most companies now. Real systems (chat app, ride share). Class boundaries first, then methods.
1 round. Stories from your first 1-3 years of production work: features you shipped, bugs you owned, working with seniors.
Showing up more at Junior loops at larger companies. Simple systems (URL shortener, rate limiter). Not deep yet.
1 round. Half culture fit, half team-specific. Be ready with questions about the team.
| Round | Tested? | Weight | What to expect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coding (DSA) | yes | high | Usually 2 rounds. LeetCode medium is the bar. Faster and cleaner than new grad. Talk through trade-offs. |
| Low-Level Design (LLD) | yes | high | 1 round at most companies now. Real systems (chat app, ride share). Class boundaries first, then methods. |
| Behavioral | yes | medium | 1 round. Stories from your first 1-3 years of production work: features you shipped, bugs you owned, working with seniors. |
| Light System Design | sometimes | medium | Showing up more at Junior loops at larger companies. Simple systems (URL shortener, rate limiter). Not deep yet. |
| Hiring Manager | yes | medium | 1 round. Half culture fit, half team-specific. Be ready with questions about the team. |
The Junior bar is real production work at small-to-medium scope. Avoid Senior or Staff content; cut early.
Chat app, ride share, splitwise. Not Parking Lot. Class design first, methods second.
LeetCode mediums. Pattern recognition under time pressure. Some hards.
First production bug, working with a senior, missed deadline, code review feedback.
Basics of caching, queues, databases. Be ready for URL shortener and rate limiter.
Threads, locks, common race conditions in your language.
Quick reference for time complexity, SQL, common patterns. Final-week review.
Paxos, Raft line-by-line. Senior+ territory.
Instagram-scale architecture, multi-region failover. Not on the Junior bar.
Stay in your scope: features, bugs, small projects you owned.
Mention concepts if relevant, but no need to go deep.
Architecture decisions, platform eng, RFC writing. Not your level.
Save those for Senior. At Junior, ownership of features and bugs is the bar.
LLD and coding share the top weight at Junior. Spend most of your time on those two.
LLD is now a real round at most companies. The highest-leverage prep for Junior.
Mediums, sometimes hards. Faster than new grad. Pattern recognition under time pressure.
First production stories. Working with seniors. Handling feedback. Build 5-6 stories.
Some Junior loops now include simple system design. Cover the basics: cache, queue, DB.
Comes up in LLD and coding. Threads, locks, common pitfalls in your language.
Final-week reference. Time complexity, SQL, common patterns.
Assumes 10-15 hours per week alongside your job. Adjust if you have a more flexible schedule.
Each company maps Junior to a different label. Click through for the full loop breakdown.
5 rounds with Bar Raiser. Heavy on Leadership Principles. LLD is asked. Coding is medium with a touch of hard.
5 rounds: 2 coding, 1 system design (light), 1 behavioral (Googleyness), 1 hiring manager. Algorithm-heavy.
5 rounds: 2 coding, 1 system design, 1 behavioral (Jedi), 1 hiring manager. Tight time pressure on coding.
Practical coding (90-min build), bug squash, system design intro, behavioral. Less algorithms, more 'can you ship'.
4-5 rounds: coding, LLD, system design intro, behavioral woven through. Microsoft's growth-mindset culture (its Model-Coach-Care leadership model) sets the tone.
Team-specific. Coding plus domain round. Behavioral focuses on craft, ownership, communication.
Targeting a company not listed? The bar is the same across big tech. Pick the closest example above, or browse all companies.