The interview loop was pretty standard. I was interviewing for an L6 loop.

One coding review, one system design on one day. One team match on the first day.

One people management, one technical leadership, and one system design one week later.

Overall positive feedback, but I didn't get an offer.

The second team match was one month later. I got this one.

For me, the overall difficulty level was medium.

Coding Review I think I did decent, not great, but it was a good conversation. I had not done hands-on coding for a while. I found out the day before my coding review interview about a website called Prepfully, which has some EMs who do code review practice. That was useful, but it would have been more useful if I had one to two weeks to practice properly.

System Design As a hobby, I like to read system design books and technical blogs from FANG. I am also on my company's architecture committee. So, system design interviews were fairly straightforward. I really enjoyed them.

People Management The interviewer was really focused on about two main questions, and we spent the whole interview discussing these plus follow-ups. We had a good conversation. Prepfully was quite useful here.

Technical Leadership I was unsure how well it went because the interviewer's child's background noise was distracting and disrupted my train of thought multiple times. The interviewer was quite apologetic, but it took a toll. It seems to have gone okay overall though.

I didn't eventually accept the offer. My current TC was higher (stock appreciation), and Google didn't budge sufficiently during negotiations.

If I were to ask your manager for any feedback about you, what will they tell me? To what extent do you agree with their assessment? What is their management style? What would you change if your roles were reversed?

Example of working and negotiating with a technical stakeholder with unreasonable demands.

Design a messaging app which will be used by schoolkids to keep in touch with their classmates.

What signals would you use to distinguish a good vs. great staff engineer in their interview loop? How would you define a "top performer"? How would you evaluate if you made the right hiring decision?