Inside a Major Tech Company's 3-Stage Interview Process

I've been through interview processes at a European neobank, a global enterprise fintech firm, and a major tech company over the past couple of years, and walked away with offers from each. Every one of them tested something different, but the process I get asked about most is the major tech company's, because it's long, structured, and genuinely intimidating if you don't know what's actually being evaluated at each stage.

That process broke down into three distinct rounds: a case study, role-specific questions, and a leadership and personality interview. Here's exactly how I approached each one, and what I'd tell a client walking into something similar.

The case study is the part most candidates stress about, and it's also the part you can't really "prepare for" in the traditional sense. There's no script to memorize here, because the scenario is built to test how you reason under uncertainty, not whether you happen to know the right answer going in.

The single most useful thing I did was ask a lot of follow-up questions before giving any kind of answer. Two things happen when you do this. First, you actually get the information you need to give a sharper, more specific response instead of a generic one. Second, and this is the part people miss, you start reading the interviewer. Their reaction tells you where to focus. If you ask about something and they move past it quickly without much interest, that's usually a sign it's not where you should spend your time. If they lean in or ask a follow-up of their own, that's where the substance of your answer should live.

This is a skill you build through repetition, not theory. Find random case studies online (there are plenty of free ones across most industries) and run through them out loud with a friend playing interviewer. The goal isn't to master any one case. It's to build the instinct for asking the right questions and reading the room in real time, which is what actually transfers to the real interview.

This round is more straightforward to prepare for, and most people under-prepare here simply because they don't use the tools already available to them. Take the actual job posting and your CV, feed both into an AI tool like Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT, and ask it to generate likely interview questions based on the overlap between the two. Generate as many as you can. The more questions you've already seen, the less anything in the real interview catches you off guard.

Then write out real answers to those questions, not bullet points, full answers, and feed those back into the same tool to pressure-test and sharpen them.

What you'll find almost every time is that your answers cluster around four or five core projects or experiences. Those become your bank. The skill isn't memorizing one fixed answer per project. It's being able to reshape the same project depending on exactly what's being asked. A question about handling conflict and a question about ownership might both pull from the same project, told two completely different ways.

This round can show up at the very start of the process or right at the end, so don't assume it's safely tucked away until later. Unlike the first two stages, it's judged less on the content of your answers and more on how you come across while giving them.

Body language matters here more than people expect, and so does cutting filler words like "um." If that's something you struggle with, I wrote a full breakdown of how to fix it here.

The other piece is simply not being afraid to show who you actually are. This isn't the round to give the safest, most polished version of yourself. It's the one where interviewers are explicitly trying to find out who you are outside of a resume. Asking questions back to the interviewer, rather than just receiving them, goes a long way too. It turns the round into a conversation instead of an interrogation.

That said, it's still worth having answers ready for the basics, just in case (Why this role? Why this company? Where do you see yourself in five years? etc.)

You probably won't lean on them heavily if the conversation flows naturally, but you don't want to get caught flat-footed on a question that simple.

Neobanks, fintech firms, and major tech companies all test for different things, but the underlying skills carry over: ask better questions, prepare with real tools instead of guessing, and let your actual personality come through instead of a script.

If you want help mapping your own answers before walking into a process like this, you can book a free intro call here.