I had an initial phone interview and then an on-site interview. The phone interview featured standard questions about C and C++, with some string parsing.

The on-site interview consisted of four rounds:

• Two rounds with engineers
• One round with management
• One round with HR

The on-site questions were challenging, but the people were nice, and the process felt fair. There were many questions about hash tables, and I discussed synchronization a fair deal.

They were very aggressive with their questioning. If I made a statement, I was expected to back it up. Even if I was right, they tried to make me feel like I could be wrong to see if I could truly defend my position.

Many questions started out not too difficult and then became harder as interviewers imposed additional restrictions. It seemed they really wanted to see if I could approach a problem from multiple points of view.

A solid understanding of data structures and basic algorithms, as well as flexibility to modify existing knowledge on the fly, will serve you well.

A technical question about traversing a made-up data structure, somewhat similar to a binary tree but with additional restrictions. It was not too difficult to do recursively, but then they asked for an iterative solution, which was more challenging.