I was contacted by a recruiter for an EM (Engineering Manager) role. I set up a 30-minute phone screen with the hiring manager. It was a general conversation about my background and experience, with no technical questions.

Following this, I was invited to a full-day onsite interview. The onsite began with a 30-minute meeting with the recruiter, during which they provided me with the list of interviewers and shared details about their backgrounds. This was followed by lunch with the hiring manager. The lunch conversation was informal, generally covering topics like Google and the challenges within their teams.

After lunch, the "real" interview began. This involved a project manager, the hiring manager's manager, two developers from the team, and one developer from another group. I was asked a mix of management and technical questions. Two of the interviewers, a developer and the project manager, were quite arrogant and seemed disengaged. The other individuals were great to interact with.

After the interview, the recruiter called to gather feedback on the interview process. A week later, I received a call from the recruiter informing me that they would not be extending an offer.

Some of the questions I recall include:

• Design an in-memory cache for webpages.
• Given a pattern and a string, write a function to determine if the string matches the pattern.
• How do you deal with low performers? High performers?
• Describe how you handle change management.
• Describe in detail a project that failed.
• Describe a project in the past that was behind schedule. Provide concrete steps that you took to remedy the situation.
• Design a distributed ID generation system.

They were standard interview questions—nothing really unexpected.