Budget the five days by round, not by problem count. A common loop is five rounds: two coding, one system design, one behavioural, one with the hiring manager, and the last three are usually the ones you own nothing in writing for. Give each round a day and finish that day with one artefact, then spend day five on a full-length dress rehearsal and a stamina plan. You want to arrive with five one-page cards, not a vague sense that you did some LeetCode.
First, get the round list. Email the recruiter and ask for the names, the titles and the schedule with break lengths. Everything below assumes a four to five hour day, and if yours runs six rounds or has a take-home debrief bolted on, the day allocation shifts to match.
Why the hours do not split evenly across the rounds
Two of five rounds are coding, so the arithmetic says forty percent of your time. Ignore the arithmetic. You got the loop, which means somebody already watched you write code and passed you, so your coding sits inside the band. The fifth hour of LeetCode this week moves your score less than the first hour spent writing down a design template you have never written down before. Budget by marginal return instead of by round count.
Fifteen hours across five days, roughly three a day, split like this.
| Round | Minutes on the day | Hours you give it | Why that number |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coding, two rounds | About 90 | 4 | You are drilling narration and back-to-back speed, not learning new patterns |
| System design, one round | About 60 | 4 | Highest variance round, and one reusable template covers most prompts |
| Behavioural, one round | About 45 | 3 | Six stories is a finishable job, and two of them get reused in the manager round |
| Hiring manager, one round | 30 to 45 | 2 | Short, but it often decides level and team fit, and it rewards research |
| Loop mechanics | The breaks | 2 | Sitting a four-hour day is a separate skill from any single round |
The five days, and the artefact each one produces
Day 1: both coding rounds, one pattern card
Six timed 25-minute problems in two blocks of three, run back to back with a five-minute gap, because the loop hands you two coding rounds inside two hours and the second one is where people come apart. The artefact is a single page: eight patterns, each with the trigger phrase that should fire it and its four-line template, plus the five sentences you open every coding round with. Restate the problem, walk one example by hand, state the brute force with its complexity, name the improvement, ask before you start typing.
Day 2: system design, one template and one worked design
Write the template before you read anything, so the words are yours: functional requirements, non-functional requirements, back-of-the-envelope numbers, API surface, data model, one diagram, the bottleneck, two named trade-offs. Then run a full 45-minute design out loud against it, timed, on paper or a shared doc. The artefact is that template plus a numbers card you have actually memorised. A day is 86,400 seconds, a million writes a day is about twelve a second, a 500-byte row a billion times over is roughly half a terabyte.
Day 3: behavioural, six stories
Six, not twenty. Conflict with a peer, a failure you owned, a decision under ambiguity, influence without authority, a project you led end to end, a time you changed your mind about your own proposal. Each is five bullets, ninety seconds spoken, with at least one real number in it. The artefact is finished when you can hear the competency word and start talking inside three seconds.
Day 4: hiring manager, a one-page brief
This is not the friendly chat round. Prepare four things: a ninety-second version of your last two years pitched at the level you are being hired for, one scope story and one story about disagreeing with a manager, three questions only somebody who read their engineering blog or changelog could ask, and your own compensation sentence written out so you never improvise it. The artefact is a page you can reread in the lift.
Day 5: dress rehearsal and the loop card
Run the real schedule at the real hours, even at half length: coding, short break, coding, design, lunch, behavioural, manager, in one sitting with the phone in another room. You are testing whether round four still has a voice in it. Then build the loop card: names and roles, join links or the building address, the snack list, three questions per interviewer, and the reset script below.
What finished means for each artefact
An artefact you cannot test is a to-do list wearing a costume. Each one gets a pass condition you check on day five.
| Artefact | Finished when | Used on the day |
|---|---|---|
| Pattern card, one page | You write all eight templates from memory in under nine minutes | Read once before round one, then never again |
| Design template, eight boxes | You recite the box order cold and fill it against an unseen prompt in 45 minutes | Drawn in the first 60 seconds of the design round, in the corner of the board |
| Story bank, six stories | Each runs 80 to 100 seconds spoken and contains a number | Behavioural round, and two get reused with the hiring manager |
| Manager brief, one page | Your three questions cannot be answered from the careers page | Last round, when you are tired and need a script |
| Loop card | It fits on one side and includes the food plan and the reset steps | Every break |
The stamina plan for a four to five hour day
Round four is scored the same as round one, and it is the round almost nobody rehearses. Treat the day as an endurance event with a food plan attached.
- Breakfast, ninety minutes before round one. Protein and a slow carbohydrate, eggs and oats rather than a pastry and a juice. Nothing you have not eaten before, and this is the wrong morning to try an unfamiliar coffee shop.
- Caffeine twice, not three times. One dose about 45 minutes before round one, the second no later than the start of round three. Anything after that lands once the loop is over, and costs you the night if there is a second day.
- Between rounds, small and fast. A banana, a handful of nuts, a square of dark chocolate. Roughly 200 to 300 millilitres of water per break, not a litre before round one, because bathroom timing on a five-minute gap is a genuine problem.
- Lunch, half of it. If the loop gives you a 45-minute lunch, eat about half a normal portion, protein and vegetables, and keep the rest for afterwards. A full lunch at the midpoint is the most common cause of a flat fourth round.
- Move every break. Stand, walk to the end of the corridor and back, and look at something six metres away for thirty seconds. On a remote loop this matters more, not less, because nothing forces you out of the chair.
- Carry the boring things. A pen, a paper notebook, a charger, and a printed loop card in case the phone dies at hour three.
The three-minute reset after a round that went badly
A bad round costs you the loop mainly when you carry it into the next one. Run the same three minutes every time, including after rounds that merely felt bad.
- Minute one, move. Leave the chair or the room. Do not sit reconstructing the bug you missed while the next interviewer is walking in.
- Minute two, one sentence, then shut the book. Write what went wrong in a single line, for example "did not check the empty input before coding". Writing it down is what lets you stop rehearsing it. Then close the notebook, physically.
- Minute three, read forward. Read the opening line of the next round's card out loud. Your mouth should have said something competent before the door opens.
Two things not to do. Do not apologise for an earlier round to the next interviewer, and do not ask anyone how you did. At most large companies each interviewer writes their feedback before the debrief and is asked not to compare notes first, though this varies by company, so treating round four as a clean slate is usually accurate as well as useful. The one legitimate repair is inside your own round: "given more time I would have indexed that column differently" is a good closing sentence, and it gets written down.
Where this plan, and this kind of tool, will not help
Five days cannot install a fundamental. If you are still looking up how to iterate a dictionary, or you have never drawn a system with a queue in it, this schedule produces five half-finished cards and a worse mood. Pick the single round you can genuinely move and let another one be weak on purpose.
The tooling limit is worth stating plainly too. An onsite loop is frequently literally onsite: their building, their laptop, a whiteboard, an interviewer three feet away. Software running on your own machine is irrelevant in that room. OfferPilot AI is Windows 10 and 11 only, with no macOS, no Linux and no mobile build, so a borrowed MacBook or an in-person whiteboard round means your preparation is all you have. Even on a remote loop, live assistance is out of bounds in a proctored assessment or a lockdown browser, and the overlay's exclusion from screen capture hides it from screen sharing and screen recording only. It does not defeat a webcam, a proctor watching you in person, a lockdown browser, or a phone camera pointed at your desk. Where it does fit is the four days before the loop: rehearsing out loud, and building the question bank. The company Q&A generator turns the company and role into a question list for day three and day four, and Code Copilot returns the intuition, a dry run and the Big-O for the day one problems you failed inside the timer. Read the intuition before the code, or day one quietly becomes copying.
The night before
No new problems. Reread the five cards once, lay out clothes and charger, confirm the address or the join link, set two alarms, and go to bed at your normal hour rather than an ambitious one. If the loop is remote, join a test call first and inspect the shared view on a second device, so you find out tonight which notifications and file names are visible.
Start day one tonight, and treat the artefacts as the deliverable rather than the hours. If you want a rehearsal partner for the read-aloud blocks, the free tier gives five minutes a day with no card, and the paid plans are listed on the pricing page.