I responded to a job offer on the Apple website by posting a resume and a short cover letter.

Two to three days later, a recruiter from Apple contacted me via email, stating my profile was interesting.

He emailed me a coding exercise that I had to complete within a week. I had to implement a small C program based on precise instructions. The test involved slightly complicated algorithms and easy data structure handling.

About one week after I completed the test, I had two similar phone interviews with engineers, each lasting under 45 minutes. We discussed my previous work experiences, how work at Apple is, and I was asked several technical questions, mostly about algorithms.

A few days later, the recruiter informed me that I was to come to Cupertino (from France, where I live) for a full day of on-site interviews. The timeline for my recruitment was tight due to a visa deadline, so the interviews had to take place quickly. They ultimately told me the timeframe was too short to organize on-site interviews, so we conducted them via iChat instead. With the time difference, the interviews took place during the night for me.

I spoke with six or seven different engineers from the team the position was part of, including my two previous interviewers. Each interview was very technical, with subjects ranging from data structures to graph theory, computational geometry, and spatial reasoning. I coded solutions and drew schematics on shared documents. Needless to say, with the last interview ending at 3 AM, I was very tired! I performed quite poorly during this session. A few hours later, I received an email stating I was not selected.

Having two distinct, very large, ordered arrays of values, find the mean value of the two arrays.