Contacted in June by a Workday sourcer on LinkedIn.

"Coffee" screen interview by a hiring manager.

Another phone screen by another hiring manager.

First onsite - 5 rounds: Senior Manager, Associate Manager, Senior SWE, DevOps Engineer, SWE Director.

Second onsite - 4 rounds: Product Manager, Hiring Manager from screen 1, DevOps Director, Principal Engineer.

• Most questions are around team management, project/resource/roadmap management, how to deal with low performers, career goals, dealing with conflict, and what you are most proud of. Interviewers from different functions are also interested in your interaction with their teams. If you have been a SWE manager for a couple of years, you should have good examples for these questions.

• One thing you might want to keep in mind is that Workday is growing really fast (over 6,000 employees now) but is not well known outside of the HR circle. A very important trait for a SWE Manager is to advocate for the team and promote their work. I did a lot of internal presentations as well as speaking at trade conferences, so this was not a problem for me.

• Technical questions are around what you have done (without revealing trade secrets - I work for a competitor!), SaaS operations/architecture, and a couple of coding/algorithm/optimization questions. (I signed an NDA. However, if you are a manager still coding, these should be no problem. No LeetCode grinding required!)

At this point (end of August), the recruiter updated that feedback was stellar and they would like to bring me onsite one final time with the SVP for his final approval. The recruiter and hiring manager were very transparent and provided frequent updates - kudos to them. However, the onsite was postponed for more than 6 weeks, and I finally got word that the team was no longer hiring a manager this year.

Overall, despite the hiring priority change in the end, the interview process was professional, and every interviewer was friendly and prepared.