I had applied for the role via their career portal. After a few days, a Sr. Technical Recruiter from the Talent Acquisition team emailed me and asked a few screening questions.

I didn't hear back anything afterwards and had to send a follow-up email a week later. Then they scheduled a technical interview, which went very well. At that point, I was told there would be 4 more interview rounds, requiring ~4 hours. IMO, this should have been mentioned at the start.

Anyway, this is where Sidekick kicks in. Sidekick is their interview process portal where you can see your schedule, meeting links, interviewer details, read about EA culture, and other tips. This portal is very well designed and very helpful for candidates.

For the next 4 rounds I had to go through, 3 of them went very well. But 1 round went weird/bad. This was a technical round, and it looked like EA couldn't find any DevOps resource to conduct this interview, so they roped in two developers. The first interviewer asked me a Dev Architect-level System Design question. And the second interviewer seemed to have googled "coding interview question" and gave me whatever he found. The coding scenario was impractical and would never be used in a real job/task.

So, in total, 5/6 interviews went very well, and 1/6 interview went below average. And I got rejected because of that. It wouldn't have stung this bad if proper DevOps folks had interviewed me with proper DevOps tech questions. If I had failed there, I would have learned from it and moved on. But having interviewers from wrong fields tanked my chances here.

To EA's credit, they didn't keep me hanging. I was informed about the result after 4 days.

First mail to last mail - 35 days.

Design an end-to-end system for a gaming website where you also have to host large media files.