I was contacted by a recruiter through LinkedIn, which was a pleasant surprise. After a short phone screen with some questions relating to my background and covering a breadth of technology to gauge my knowledge and experience, I was scheduled for several more rounds of interviews.

I was next interviewed by an SRE. The interview covered a couple of general programming-type questions; no big surprises here.

After this, I was flown out to Mountain View, CA, to do on-site interviews. I had four technical interviews with various engineers, covering a wide variety of programming problems and concepts (from data structures to map-reduce). I also had lunch with an engineer, where I was able to get a lot more of my informal questions answered.

Overall, it was an extremely positive experience. The majority of the engineers (with one minor exception) were very pleasant to talk with. The recruiters were all quick to respond and communicative. Even though I feel like there is an element of randomness to the interviews (will you get questions close to your expertise? Will you prepare for the right questions?), it was an overall great experience, and I wouldn't be afraid of applying in the future if I wanted my career to go in that direction.