I was referred by an Apple employee after she saw our project at a hackathon. She seemed pretty impressed with us because she submitted our resumes to Apple.

Though I did not make it through the funnel for some positions, I ended up getting a callback from a recruiter for an Escalation Engineering position within iTunes.

The initial call with the recruiter is pretty brief, but they'll ask you questions about your career aspirations, your understanding of the position, and the salary range you're looking at.

The next step is a 30-minute phone screen with the hiring manager. In my case, both the hiring manager and one of the lead escalation engineers were on the call. They asked me a mix of behavioral questions and also questions that gauged my technical knowledge (e.g., Do you know SQL, Excel, UNIX, etc.?).

In my case, they tried to get as much out of me as possible, so the phone interview was nearly an hour long. It was a good conversation, so I didn't mind at all.

If you make it past the phone screen, you are invited for an on-site visit at Apple for a full day. If you're flying from a nearby area, they'll have you fly in and fly out the same day. If you're flying from farther away, they will provide hotel accommodations but not transportation (at least from what I gathered).

Each on-site interview differs. In my case, the team was pretty big, so I had about 12 back-to-back 30-minute interviews. Since this position communicates with a lot of different people, I talked to individuals from the product support team, the customer experience team, the software engineering team, etc.

It gets exhausting, so make sure to take them up on the breaks they offer you.

Since I'm not as strong on the technical side, they wanted to do a follow-up interview with me two weeks later with the hiring manager. They asked how I would prepare if given the position. They also wanted to schedule another interview after that with the hiring manager's boss.

Unfortunately, at this point, I had already received a really generous offer from another company, so I had to turn down the interview.

Regardless, each interview experience is different. I thought the people I interviewed with at Apple are all very smart, diligent, and extremely hard-working.

They had me answer questions based on SQL and Excel.