Four rounds at Dell, and knowing when to ask

Company	Dell Technologies
Team	Office of the CTO (OCTO), AI Dev
Role	Software Engineer Graduate Co-op
Location	Massachusetts, an hour's drive from Boston. Virtual loop
Date	March 2025
How it started	Cold application
Rounds	4
Outcome	Offer. Accepted, for Fall 2025

The second offer on this site, after Adobe. The two are connected: Adobe is the reason this loop nearly did not work, and the way it was handled is the reason it did.

The loop

Round	What it was	Format	Self Rating
1	Meet and greet with the hiring leader, an engineering director. 30 minutes	Behavioural. My resume, my experience, and what I wanted to work on	Strong Hire / Hire
2	Problem solving. First half of a 90 minute session with two engineers	One LeetCode easy, sliding window	Strong Hire / Hire
3	Test-driven design. Second half of the same session	Low-level design of a hash map, built test-first	Strong Hire / Hire
4	Offer call	The recruiter, with the feedback and then the offer

The design round

Rounds 2 and 3 were one 90 minute session with two engineers. The first half was a LeetCode easy, a sliding window. The second was a hash map, designed at the class level, with the tests written before the code they test. No trick, no pattern to recognise. It is the round in my log that looks most like the actual job.

The question I held back

Between the first round and the final session I got the Adobe offer: a summer internship ending on Friday 15 August. Dell’s co-op would have overlapped it. The only way to do both was to start at Dell on Monday the 18th, which meant asking a team that had not yet decided whether it wanted me to change its plans for me.

I wrote to the recruiter before the final round and asked whether the team could be flexible. Her advice was to hold the question. Teams sometimes adjust the term for a candidate they really want, she said, so the move was to do the final interview first, let them decide I was their top choice, and only then raise the dates. Raised before the interview, the same request might have coloured how they saw me in it.

So I did the final session without it hanging over the conversation, the offer came, and then the dates were discussed. The team agreed. I finished at Adobe on the Friday and the co-op ran from August to December.

It is also worth saying that this was a recruiter actively on my side. Set it against the Amazon loop, where the recruiter stopped replying, or Bloomberg, where my feedback never got an answer.