I applied through a recruiter.

There was a recruiter call, and then a technical screen that had a full-on DSA question involving graphs, and they wanted it optimised. I hadn't written real code in a year or so. Don't assume the EM title gets you out of this.

The onsite was four rounds for me:

• Two leadership ones, one on people management (hiring, low performers vs high performers, remote team management, googliness mixed in) and one on project management (talking through a technical project end to end - dependencies, process, measuring success).
• System design, standard large-scale stuff. Mine was a monitoring system. At one point the interviewer said something like, "Let's assume that's not a constraint," and I kept going down that path for another minute before realising he wanted me to move on. It would've saved time if I'd caught it sooner.
• A last round where they gave me a choice of coding or code review. I took code review. You basically leave comments on a doc like it's a real PR - naming, bugs, edge cases, better complexity. It felt way more like my actual job. I was told later EMs are expected to lean this way anyway.

Then there was HC and team match. Mine happened before the onsite weirdly. I don't know why. The recruiter said that changed a couple of years back, and YMMV.

For prep, I reread Grokking the System Design Interview, did maybe like forty LeetCode mediums just to get the rust off, and also did a mock with a Google EM on Prepfully mostly for project management. He pushed on why I chose one methodology over another, and I realised I had never actually articulated that better when I convey it. Thank God I fixed it before the interview. I'd say just don't skip the coding prep because you're a manager.