Interview mechanics

Senior interviews test whether you can solve a problem. Staff and team lead interviews test whether you can pick the problem, frame it, and get other people to solve it with you. Different bar, different preparation. This chapter is the scoring rubric, the loop formats company by company, and the structural habits that decide the outcome before any technical content is exchanged.

The single most common failure at this level is telling senior-level stories in a staff-level interview: the story is about what you built, not about how the org changed. The second most common is doing the design round as requirements to boxes to done, skipping capacity math and the API contract, and never once saying "the alternative was X; I am not choosing it because Y; if Z changed I would revisit."

What this chapter covers

• [todo] What gets scored: the six signals, and what senior vs staff looks like on each
• [done] The staff-level design interview
• [todo] The rounds nobody prepares for: design doc review, code review, debugging, incident simulation, take-home
• [todo] Company loop formats: Google, Meta, Amazon, Stripe, Netflix, Databricks, Uber, Shopify, AI labs
• [todo] The architecture deep dive on your own past work, at three zoom levels
• [todo] Above-and-beyond differentiators: the artifact, the 30/60/90, the follow-up that adds value
• [todo] Executive communication: BLUF, altitude calibration, signposting, bounded uncertainty
• [todo] Handling what you do not know, without bluffing and without wasting the at-bat
• [todo] Scar-tissue stories and where to deploy them
• [todo] Whiteboard and remote mechanics; interview-day stamina
• [done] SCOR, STAR and the scar-tissue story

Source: §1 to §14, §27, §38.