I applied for Cloudflare online, and the next day was contacted by a Hiring Manager for a phone screen. During this screen, I was able to further clarify the position, as the online job description seemed to list more responsibilities under the requirements section, leading to some confusion around what the job actually involved.

After this screening, I was contacted to set up a technical interview. Initially, this was to be over the phone, but it was later organized to be over Skype – a leniency for which I was thankful. In my experience, technical interviews over the phone are not easy for either party.

This technical interview mostly covered standard Linux debugging (strace, netstat, ps, the /proc tree, etc.) and networking concepts (How does making a web request work? DNS stuff). We then went through a few debugging scenarios, which were very D&D-esque: "You see this, what do you do?" I believe this interview was more to gauge problem-solving skills than anything else.

About a day after this interview, I was contacted to set up a call with the Engineering Manager. This call was a rather straightforward managerial interview: "Why Cloudflare?" "How would you describe Cloudflare's business?" "Why should we select you?" etc.

After that interview, we organized an onsite interview at Cloudflare's London office. This took a couple of weeks – understandable considering the difficulty in wrangling people's schedules. The hiring team was very gracious when I asked to reschedule.

The onsite interview was a full day and consisted of:

• A technical interview (which was very well done; it involved a series of problems to solve on a throwaway DigitalOcean droplet).
• An interview with two other members of the team (mostly discussing my background, with a few other technical questions thrown in).
• An interview with a couple of people from the network engineering team.
• A final debrief with the Engineering Manager.

During this, I also had lunch with a couple of the engineers I would be working with, which was an enjoyable experience.

From the onsite interview, everything moved exceedingly quickly. About half an hour after I stepped out of the office, I received an email asking for my availability for phone conversations over the next week. Over the course of the week, I had phone conversations with the Head of Operations and the CEO, who helped clarify any remaining questions I had about the company.

Two days following these conversations, I received an offer, which I gladly accepted.

The one thing that baffled me was the use of phone conversations. The process would be better served by moving to a VoIP system like Hangouts or Skype, especially for technical interviews. The one phone technical interview I did have, I organized with the interviewer to perform it over Skype, however. At least there is some flexibility.

Throughout the process, I was kept informed with regular updates from the hiring manager regarding the status of my application, and I was thoroughly impressed with the entire process.

Walk through the debugging steps for why a web request may be timing out.