Tier 2 & Tier 3

Stripe, Airbnb, Snowflake, Databricks, Cloudflare, and 30+ more, each with its own loop.

Tier 2

Uber

tier-2

Geo + real-time + dispatch heavy. Machine-coding OOP > LC tricks.

Bar RaiserStrong System Design

LinkedIn

tier-2

Hiring Committee + Host Manager final. AI-assisted round trending.

Strong System DesignAI-enabled Coding

Salesforce

tier-2

Platform-specific + multi-tenant design. Quip-based coding.

Project-basedCulture Heavy

Adobe

tier-2

OOP + fundamentals MCQs. Take-home + presentation common.

Take-home HeavyProject-based

Snowflake

tier-2

DB internals + concurrency + DDIA. Project presentation for senior.

Domain Deep-diveStrong System Design

Databricks

tier-2

4–8 week process. Concurrency + Spark + Lakehouse design.

Domain Deep-diveStrong System Design

Stripe

tier-2

5 stages over 7–9 weeks. Real-API integration + API design = signature.

Project-basedAI ProhibitedStrong System Design

Airbnb

tier-2

DP + Graphs heavy. Code Review round unique. Core Values gate.

Heavy DSACulture Heavy

Palantir

tier-2

Decomposition + Re-engineering + project tasks. Not LC-style.

Project-basedDomain Deep-dive

Robinhood

tier-2

Two system design rounds. Project deep dive. Fintech LLD.

Strong System Design

ByteDance / TikTok

tier-2

2–3 LC problems per round. Optimal solution culture.

Coinbase

tier-2

Production code > LC tricks. Ledger / idempotency design.

Project-basedCulture Heavy

Tier 3

Cloudflare

tier-3

3–5 weeks. HM screen prioritized earlier. Live coding mimicking day-to-day (debugging/refactoring, not tree traversal). Take-home + Code Pair extension. System design forbids managed services.

Domain Deep-diveStrong System Design

Datadog

tier-3

3–6 weeks, 4–5 stages. Tech phone screen → onsite 4–5 rounds: 2 pair-programming CoderPad coding, system design (Excalidraw), debugging/production-simulation round, behavioral/HM.

AI ProhibitedDomain Deep-dive

Atlassian

tier-3

Values-led loop. Pair-programming coding rounds, system design, behavioral mapped to 5 values.

HubSpot

tier-3

Take-home + technical conversation + behavioral aligned to HEART culture.

Twilio

tier-3

API design + integration scenarios + system design + behavioral.

New Relic

tier-3

Observability domain depth. Coding + system design + behavioral.

Domain Deep-dive

Okta

tier-3

IdP/SSO + auth flows + coding + design.

Domain Deep-dive

Splunk

tier-3

Search + ingest + SPL flavor. Coding + system design.

Domain Deep-dive

MongoDB

tier-3

DB internals + concurrency + DDIA-level system design.

Domain Deep-diveStrong System Design

Elastic

tier-3

Search + Lucene internals + observability depth.

Domain Deep-diveStrong System Design

Confluent

tier-3

Kafka + stream processing depth. Coding + system design + behavioral.

Domain Deep-diveStrong System Design

PagerDuty

tier-3

Incident-response domain + system design.

Domain Deep-dive

Zendesk

tier-3

Coding + system design + behavioral.

Workday

tier-3

Enterprise HR/finance SaaS. Coding + system design + behavioral.

Domain Deep-dive

ServiceNow

tier-3

Workflow platform depth. Coding + design + behavioral.

Domain Deep-dive

VMware

tier-3

Virtualization + systems internals. C/C++ heavy for kernel roles.

Domain Deep-dive

Cisco

tier-3

Networking depth. C/C++ for systems roles.

Domain Deep-dive

IBM (Cloud)

tier-3

Enterprise cloud + AI. Coding + system design + behavioral.

SAP

tier-3

Enterprise ERP/HANA depth.

Domain Deep-dive

HashiCorp

tier-3

~5 rounds over 3–5 weeks. No LeetCode; pair programming/machine-coding in Go; PR-style code-review round; Raft/Paxos/IaC depth. Remote-first.

Project-basedDomain Deep-dive