PlayStation Interview Questions
& Process

Applied in early November and heard back from the recruiter about a week later to set up an initial one-on-one call. That first chat was good for setting expectations about the role, the team, and overall fit. After that, about a month passed with no contact, even after a couple of follow-ups. But once things got moving again, it was smooth. Next was a 45-min chat with the hiring manager for Product Management, which felt more like a conversation about background, experience, and mutual fit. Then, a 30-min discussion with the Staff Product Manager I'd work with, focused on practical, real-world scenarios. The third interview was with a Senior Software Engineering Manager, covering more technical and scenario-based questions, plus deeper behavioral follow-ups, giving a good sense of the product-engineering collaboration. The final round was a panel with people from engineering, product, and design, mostly about culture, collaboration, and cross-functional fit. Got the offer within a week of the panel. Overall, ignoring the initial communication gap, the interviews themselves were positive, respectful, and well-organized, with each round offering more clarity.

So this ML Dev Ops role had like a 4.5 stage process, pretty standard stuff. It took about a month from the first call to getting the offer. They started with a recruiter call where we chatted about my background, they gave more details on the job, set expectations, and we talked salary and just general getting to know each other. Then the first real stage was with the Senior Hiring Manager, who really drilled down into my experience with deploying applications, especially ML models, and my CI/CD background. They wanted specifics on my old CICD setups, how artifacts were managed, and where models were kept. This was followed by a Leetcode medium question. The next week, they hit me with a System Design question, where I had to design a whole CI/CD system, assuming nothing existed. Right after that, we did a live coding question, which I thought was a good, practical way to test coding skills, not like typical Leetcode. A week after that, there was a behavioral interview with a senior TPM. They asked about conflict resolution, dealing with unclear client specs, teamwork, and general collaboration. I got the unofficial offer about 4 days after that, and the official letter came 3 days later.

I had an initial call with a recruiter from the US who did a great job selling the company and role. The first interview was with a Manager (covering), which was supposed to cover my CV and technicalities. However, the format changed, and the manager avoided discussing my experience to ask pre-prepared questions that felt AI-generated, like 'what do you think it’s the data challenge at PlayStation?'. The most technical part was asking 'if we have a classifier, for example, a decision tree, how do you train it?', expecting a simple explanation. The focus was immaturely business-oriented, not the technical excitement I anticipated, especially since they were looking for someone knowledgeable in areas like Transformers. The questions about AI's influence on work sealed the disappointing impression, given it's PlayStation.

Started with a recruiter screen, then an interview with a Senior Brand Manager, followed by an interview with the Hiring Manager and another marketing team member. The recruiter was super nice and explained every step clearly, really showing the Playstation culture. The hiring manager and the rest of the team I spoke with were also great. Even though I didn't get the job, I got feedback on my application, and the recruiter even offered to give more feedback over the phone or email. Overall, it was a really good experience, and I wish the team the best.