Four rounds at ServiceNow, and results that came too late

Company	ServiceNow
Team	Developer Productivity
Role	Software Engineer Intern, 2025
Location	San Diego, CA. Virtual loop
Date	October to December 2024
How it started	Cold application
Rounds	4
Outcome	Withdrew. Results were delayed, and I had accepted Adobe in the meantime

This ran in the same weeks as the Adobe loop, for the same summer. It is the one I stepped away from, because Adobe moved first.

The loop

Round	What it was	Format	Self Rating
1	Recruiter screen. Late October	Why ServiceNow, why this role, and what I bring to it	Strong Hire
2	Systems, with a senior engineering manager. 30 minutes	High-level design and the CAP theorem, then behavioural questions and my projects	Hire
3	Problem solving, with a staff engineer. 30 minutes	One LeetCode medium on strings and hash maps, then my projects	Strong Hire
4	Problem solving, with a senior staff engineer. 30 minutes	One LeetCode medium, sliding window, then Docker and Kubernetes, then my projects	Hire

Three interviews in one afternoon

Rounds 2 to 4 all ran on Thursday 14 November: two back to back, a two hour gap, then the third. Thirty minutes each, and every one of them ended on my projects, so the same work got walked through three times for three different people.

Two things in it were unusual for an internship. The first interviewer opened on system design and the CAP theorem, which is a conversation most intern loops skip entirely. The last one followed a medium with questions on Docker and Kubernetes, which is to say on how software gets run rather than how it gets written.

Why it ended there

Adobe’s decision came first, and I accepted it in December. ServiceNow’s results were slow to come back, and by the time they did I had already committed for the summer, so I stepped out of the process.

Three months later the same Adobe internship collided with another loop’s timing, and at Dell it went the other way.