INTERVIEW ROUNDS

The bar raiser round

A round with a trained interviewer from outside the hiring team whose job is to keep the hiring bar high. At Amazon the bar raiser can veto a hire and runs the debrief; Uber and some Oracle teams use the same idea.

What happens

The bar raiser asks behavioral questions (often the hardest Leadership Principles) and sometimes a coding or design problem. They are not under pressure to fill the role, so they judge whether you are better than half the people already at that level. In the debrief they challenge weak evidence from other interviewers.

What is expected at each level

SDE 1 · New grad to about 2 years

Behavioral depth plus a coding or object-oriented design problem.

SDE 2 · About 2 to 5 years

Behavioral depth with probing follow-ups; sometimes design.

SDE 3 · Senior, about 5 to 10 years

Scope and leadership of your projects; a strong signal for level.

SDE 4 · Staff, principal and above

Org-level impact and judgment.

How to prepare

• Prepare stories for Customer Obsession, Ownership, Dive Deep and Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit.
• Expect the same story to be probed five levels deep: know the details.
• Treat every round as if it were the bar raiser: you are not told which one it is.

Common mistakes

• Thin stories that fall apart under follow-ups
• Taking credit for team results
• Treating it as a casual chat

Companies that use it

• Amazon · All levels
  A trained interviewer from outside the hiring team, usually not identified to you, who checks whether you raise the company-wide bar and can block a hire.
• Uber · SDE 3, SDE 4
  A cross-org Bar Raiser runs a project deep dive or reverse design, carries a lot of weight for leveling, and moderates the debrief.
• Oracle · SDE 2, SDE 3, SDE 4
  Cloud infrastructure (OCI) loops often include a bar-raiser round by a senior engineer from another team.

Other rounds

The online assessment (OA) · The phone screen · The coding round (DSA) · The AI-assisted coding round · Low-level design and machine coding · The system design round (HLD) · Team-specific rounds · The behavioral round · The hiring manager round · Team match and hiring committee