I was contacted by a third-party recruiter, contracted by Google, who arranged a 45-minute phone screen.

The phone screen was performed by an engineer and was entirely technical in nature.

After a week or two, I was informed that I was moving on to in-person interviews and was flown down to California for a day of interviews. As part of this, I was "transferred" from the original recruiter to an internal recruiter who would manage the rest of the process.

There were five interviews throughout the day, each one hour long with a different engineer. They were again technical in nature and obviously involved more back-and-forth than the phone screen, with lots of whiteboard work. I also had a chance to look around the Mountain View campus.

After that, two weeks later, I was informed that I had done well and was given the opportunity to chat with a few interested managers about potential projects over the phone. After discussing with the recruiter, I received an offer, including a relocation plan. There was not a lot of room for negotiation here, unfortunately, but from my research, my offer was a bit higher than expected for my experience level, so I was happy.

A few months later, I moved and started my new job! As a Canadian moving to the US for work, a TN visa was secured for me by Google-paid lawyers, and they paid extra to get it processed in time. For the first two months, I was put up in a furnished corporate apartment, which was pretty convenient.

One of my interviewers had expertise in hardware, and we had an oddball interview because of that (I don't have much experience with hardware).

To be fair, he did ask me at the start if I was comfortable going down that route.

By the end, we had sketched out a fairly complete (but high-level) diagram of a hardware system.

To this day, I don't know if he gave me favorable feedback or not!