Reached out by a recruiter the very next day after I applied for the job. The recruiter was prompt in her responses and did a great job coordinating the whole process. The first step in the process was an interview with the Hiring Manager, who described what the team does and focused on my past experience with some behavioral questions. I was asked to dive deep on a recent project of mine. The next step was a 1 hr phone screen with a senior engineer covering behavioral questions about past experience followed by a live coding round (easy). The last step was 4 rounds of virtual onsite, 1 hr each, with senior engineers and senior manager of the team. The first three were focused on system design and behavioral questions. It seems SoFi really wants people who are good at system design to help build their products and scale them. I had the best experience though - the design questions were challenging but very enjoyable, fluid and conversational. Interviewers were polite and really seemed to want you to succeed. The last interview of the day was focused on live coding (medium difficulty) with a mix of behavioral. Overall, I had a great interview experience and came away with a feeling of wanting to work with the engineers who interviewed me.

Applied online. Recruiter call was in a few days. Tech screen went good, but the job I applied to was filled and they transferred me to another role. The interviewer were professional and friendly, but after each onsite round I had major concerns about wanting to join. 2 rounds went atleast ok or better, third round went bad, and in hindsight I dodged a bullet (for my career). Behavioral - barely any leadership or actual behavioral conversations. I won’t go into details, but this was the weirdest interview of this sort I ever been in. Manager was clearly inexperienced and I would have had a tough time building a career in their team. Biggest red flag - was how much of a push back the company seems to have for large scale ai adoption. Coding - dealbreaker where I failed. The interview schedule said x and the interview was for y. I had been prepping and went in for something completely different from what the interviewer wanted to focus on. In normal times I could have answered it well. But a high stakes interview, red flags from other interviews, miscommunicated expectations. Just not the best environment to succeed. That said, another red flag - the interviewer was complaining about how many meetings they had that weeks. And that they were “forced” to attend ai meetings. System design - went decent, I might have fared better in explaining the why, rather than just the how. Scope for improvement but not rejection imo. Minor red flag - how much the interviewer seemed disengaged with the actual work they were doing. Also, did I mention 3 typos and 2 grammatical errors in the schedule email! An ai-averse Eng team, scheduling team who doesn’t have basic proof reading? Sure, it would have been a notable pay bump if I had an offer and joined, but that would have risked career stagnation.