The process was initiated by a recruiter who reached out to me via email. He mentioned he found me through my LinkedIn profile and was interested in a short phone conversation. During that conversation, we discussed my skills and experience, and he outlined a potential role (SET) to gauge my interest. Once I expressed interest, he scheduled an engineering phone screen, which was one hour long.

The phone screen involved a conversation with another SET. He briefly outlined his experience, then asked me to talk about myself. This lasted 5-10 minutes, after which we moved on to a programming question. All code was written in a Google Doc.

About two weeks after the phone screen, my recruiter contacted me to let me know they wanted to bring me on-site. They flew me out on a Sunday, and the full day of interviews took place on Monday. I then flew back on Tuesday.

The on-site interviews are where they truly assess your understanding of data structures and algorithms, and how you perform under pressure. The day consisted of five 45-minute interviews and a 45-minute lunch. Each interview followed a similar format to the phone screen: 5-10 minutes of introductions, followed by coding questions. It's important to note that all coding questions are done on a whiteboard, making it crucial to practice coding by hand. You truly don't appreciate how helpful autocomplete is until you're working without it.

After the on-site interviews, each interviewer provides feedback and a score. This feedback is then given to a hiring committee who, unofficially, makes the hiring decision. While there are still executive and compensation committees afterward, based on my research and conversations with my recruiter, the hiring committee is the most challenging to pass.

Overall, I found this process to be quite smooth. I did prolong it slightly because I hadn't used Java in years and had a major project at my current job, but expect the entire process to take at least 2-3 months from initial contact to an offer.

They requested that I don't share any interview questions. However, I will say that a deep understanding of data structures, especially hash maps and heaps, is going to go a long way for you.