What is expected in the behavioral round at SDE 1?

Stories from internships, projects or your first job are fine. Show learning, ownership and teamwork.

What is expected in the behavioral round at SDE 2?

Stories should show you owning features end to end and handling conflict maturely.

What is expected in the behavioral round at SDE 3?

Expected scope: projects across quarters, influencing other teams, mentoring.

What is expected in the behavioral round at SDE 4?

Expected scope: org-wide impact, setting direction, hard trade-offs with leadership.

INTERVIEW ROUNDS

The behavioral round

A conversation about how you have worked: conflict, failure, ownership, ambiguity and impact. Companies like Amazon, Netflix and Airbnb treat it as seriously as coding, and a weak result can block an offer on its own.

What happens

The interviewer asks for real stories ("Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager") and probes with follow-ups. Answers are scored against the company’s framework: Amazon’s Leadership Principles, Google’s Googleyness and Leadership, Netflix’s culture memo, Airbnb’s core values. The STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, Result) keeps stories focused on what you did.

What is expected at each level

Your level

SDE 1 · New grad to about 2 years: Stories from internships, projects or your first job are fine. Show learning, ownership and teamwork.
SDE 2 · About 2 to 5 years: Stories should show you owning features end to end and handling conflict maturely.
SDE 3 · Senior, about 5 to 10 years: Expected scope: projects across quarters, influencing other teams, mentoring.
SDE 4 · Staff, principal and above: Expected scope: org-wide impact, setting direction, hard trade-offs with leadership.

How to prepare

Write 8 to 10 stories in the AlgoRung story bank and tag each to the values it shows.
Every story needs a number in the result: latency, revenue, time saved, incidents avoided.
Say "I", not "we": the interviewer is scoring your actions.
Prepare a failure story where you learned something specific.

Common mistakes

Hypothetical answers instead of real stories
No result, or a result without a number
Blaming others in conflict stories
Using the same story for everything

Companies that use it

Google · All levels
The Googleyness and Leadership round uses STAR-style questions on ambiguity, conflict and learning; the 2026 pilot adds a technical talk-through of a past project.
Amazon · All levels
A round focused on Leadership Principles: four to six STAR stories, each mapped to one or two principles, with detailed follow-up probing.
Meta · All levels
Conflict, mistakes, missed deadlines, ambiguity and impact; senior candidates need multi-quarter projects with measurable impact.
Apple · All levels
Conflict, failure, decisions with limited information and caring about the user; 'Why Apple?' can come up in any round.
Netflix · All levels
Culture rounds test each value in the culture memo with real stories.
Airbnb · All levels
Two core values interviews, often run by trained employees outside the hiring team, which can block an offer on their own.
Atlassian · All levels
The values interview, usually led by someone outside engineering, with roughly one question per value and probing follow-ups.
Goldman Sachs · SDE 1, SDE 2, SDE 3
An HR or behavioral round on ownership, deadlines, conflict and ethics scenarios.

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 hiring manager round · The bar raiser round · Team match and hiring committee