1. The recruiter reached out to me after applying on Akamai's website and had a brief chat regarding salary requirements, position details, etc.

Then, he mentioned that he would set up two phone calls – one with the hiring manager and another technical interview with another senior solutions architect.

1. The two calls with the hiring manager and senior architect went pretty well.

The hiring manager was interested more in my attitude and was focusing on the basics (some of which were rusty) – HTTP caching headers, HTTP responses, etc.

What is the difference between a codec and a container?

And some questions outside of work – what two numbers add up to 10?

Very casual, and it went well.

Second call with the sr. architect went well too – can you please describe the TCP session setup? and TCP congestion avoidance algorithms.

After this, I was invited onsite at San Mateo for more interviews.

1. Onsite @ San Mateo – had 6 45-minute interviews, including one more with the hiring manager, an account manager for which you might potentially be working with, 2 senior architects, and another practice manager.

Overall, it went very well. The interviews were focusing more on attitude.

The senior architects were more interested on the technical side – DNS flows, does the DNS need to be authoritative if you are using a CDN, etc.?

What are some of Akamai's offerings in the DNS space and some fundamentals of how they work?

1. After the onsite interview, I had one more phone interview with the director of the services organization.

He wanted to find out more about the different trends in video streaming – what problems is MPEG DASH trying to solve? What is HTML 5?

And also outside of work – what are your hobbies?

IMO, all interviews went pretty well and it was a good experience. All the people I talked to were pretty great and knowledgeable in their respective fields.

I feel 45 minutes per interview is not much time to showcase all your skills and what you can bring to the table. I did not notice the time running out on almost all interview slots.

But a great place to work for.

Some Qs on fundamentals since it was a long time since I touched them: SSL/Certificate authentication call flow