CrackingWalnuts
4-8 years of experience. The bar shifts from execution to ownership, judgment, and craft. System design and behavioral are the two rounds that decide it.
Design across services, make and defend trade-offs, and lead a design review.
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 1-2 rounds. Often the deciding round at Senior. Expect Instagram, Uber, payment systems, search engines.
Usually 2 rounds, LeetCode medium to hard. You should solve clean code in under 30 minutes per problem.
1-2 rounds. The bar shifts from execution to ownership. STAR stories at 3-6 month scope, real cross-functional work.
Common at Amazon, Microsoft, some Indian tech companies. Less common at Meta and Google. Parking Lot is too easy; expect real systems.
Usually one round. Half behavioral, half team fit. Bring 2-3 questions about the team.
If the team is infra, ML, or security focused, expect a deep-dive in their domain. Otherwise rare at Senior.
| Round | Tested? | Weight | What to expect |
|---|---|---|---|
| System Design (HLD) | yes | high | Usually 1-2 rounds. Often the deciding round at Senior. Expect Instagram, Uber, payment systems, search engines. |
| Coding (DSA) | yes | medium | Usually 2 rounds, LeetCode medium to hard. You should solve clean code in under 30 minutes per problem. |
| Behavioral | yes | high | 1-2 rounds. The bar shifts from execution to ownership. STAR stories at 3-6 month scope, real cross-functional work. |
| Low-Level Design (LLD) | sometimes | medium | Common at Amazon, Microsoft, some Indian tech companies. Less common at Meta and Google. Parking Lot is too easy; expect real systems. |
| Hiring Manager | yes | medium | Usually one round. Half behavioral, half team fit. Bring 2-3 questions about the team. |
| Domain Round | sometimes | varies | If the team is infra, ML, or security focused, expect a deep-dive in their domain. Otherwise rare at Senior. |
This is the highest-leverage section on the page. Most candidates over-prepare Staff+ topics and under-prepare Senior depth. Use this list to cut.
Scalability, caching, queues, databases, sharding. The bread and butter.
Arrays, trees, graphs, DP. Refresh, don't relearn from scratch.
Real ownership, real outcomes, alternatives considered.
Ride-sharing, payment gateway, splitwise. Not just Parking Lot.
Threads, locks, async patterns in the language you'll code in.
Postgres vs MySQL, Redis, Kafka. Be able to defend choices.
TCP vs UDP, HTTP/HTTPS, load balancers, CDN basics.
Consensus, replication, sharding, ordering. The concepts the system design round probes.
Storage engines (B-tree vs LSM), indexing, MVCC, replication, isolation levels. The 'how does the database actually do this' follow-ups.
Atomic decisions and the senior follow-ups: hot keys, idempotency, replica lag.
Save these for Staff+ loops. At Senior, focus on 3-6 month projects.
Staff+ topic. Mentoring is OK; running hiring loops is not your level yet.
Staff+ topic. You'll rarely be asked at Senior.
Unless infra team. Knowing the high-level model is enough.
Unless AI-flavored team. The general System Design pool covers AI patterns adequately.
Internal developer platforms are Staff+. Senior gets infra basics.
Cross-team work at Staff scope is not expected at Senior bar.
Priority order based on what actually decides Senior offers. Spend more time at the top of the list.
Highest leverage for Senior. Often the round that decides offer vs no-offer.
Second highest leverage. The bar shifts here; story bank is the work.
Refresh, not relearn. Pattern recognition is what matters at Senior speed.
Required at some companies. Practice 4-5 problems if your loop has an LLD round.
Often comes up in deep-dive parts of System Design and coding.
Be ready to defend technology choices in System Design.
Go deeper for the design round: consensus, replication, sharding, ordering, and the trade-offs to defend.
The storage-engine and replication follow-ups the design round drills: B-tree vs LSM, indexing, MVCC, replica lag, isolation levels. Pairs with Distributed Systems.
Drill the senior follow-ups: hot keys, idempotency, replica lag, the question after the question.
Final-week skim before each round. Don't try to learn new material here.
Adjust based on how much background you already have. The schedule assumes 10-12 hours per week.
Each company maps Senior to a different level label. Click through for the full loop breakdown, leveling rubric, and 6-week study plan.
5 rounds: 2 coding, 1 system design, 1 behavioral (Jedi), 1 hiring manager. Coding is 2 medium problems in 45 min each. Behavioral asks for impact and conflict stories.
5-6 rounds: 2 coding, 2 system design, 1 behavioral (Googleyness), 1 hiring manager. Coding leans algorithms-heavy. System design is high bar at L5.
5 rounds, one of them a Bar Raiser. Heavy Leadership Principle focus across every round. 16 LPs to map stories to. LLD is asked.
Practical coding (build a small system in 90 min), system design, behavioral (Operating Principles), bug squash. Heavier on practical engineering than algorithms.
4-5 rounds: coding, system design, behavioral, hiring manager. LLD often asked. Behavioral leans on Microsoft's growth-mindset culture (its Model-Coach-Care leadership model).
Team-specific. Coding plus a domain round in the team's specialty (iOS, Services, Hardware). Behavioral focuses on craft and ownership.
Targeting a company not listed? The bar is the same across big tech. Pick the closest example above, or browse all companies.