Warner Bros. Discovery Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I decided to withdraw my application during the interview process because the interviewer was really rude and dismissive. I was surprised because I expected better from leadership, especially the hiring manager who was also condescending. Interviews are supposed to be a two-way thing, where you check out the company culture too. The disrespect made it clear what the work environment would be like, so I couldn't see myself working there and decided to leave.

I went through two interview processes with different teams. For the first, a recruiting contractor from WB reached out and asked general questions. Then, I had a technical screening with another developer involving an algorithmic question (not from LeetCode). Following that were three 1-hour interviews back-to-back: the first was debugging code, the second was a manager talk focusing on cultural fit, and the last was a system design interview, though more focused on OOP principles than typical cloud infrastructure, which I mistakenly focused on. I received a rejection almost a month later. While the people I interacted with were great, the main issue was the lack of communication from HR, taking over a month to send the final rejection. Despite this, I'd rate it 8/10 because they eventually sent it. The second reach out is confusing; an HR contacted me for a 15-minute call but then delayed scheduling due to applicant volume, right before Christmas. I assumed they'd contact me after New Year's, but it's been almost 10 days, and even with a follow-up, they haven't scheduled anything, suggesting the position might be closed. I didn't even get to interview with them for this one, so I'm rating it 1/10.

We talked about my past projects and my coding experience. Then, I was given a system design challenge: come up with a design for a scalable chat application. We dug into details about data storage, how the servers would be set up, and managing lots of people using it at once. We also went over the trade-offs and what makes it hard to scale. After that, there was a coding problem focused on data structures: build an LRU Cache. We talked through different ways to do it, and I ended up coding it using a doubly-linked list and a hashmap. It was a tough but good round.