I was contacted by a recruiter thanks to a referral from a Googler friend.

First, I had a quick (5-10 minutes) phone call with a recruiter. I described my background and interests at a very high level. The recruiter didn't really ask any questions.

The next day, I was contacted to schedule a technical phone interview. I asked for three weeks for preparation.

The technical phone interview was about 30 minutes long. There was only one problem, and I had to implement a solution in a shared Google Doc.

Within a few days to a week, they contacted me to schedule an on-site interview. I asked for another month for preparation.

There were five back-to-back interviews with engineers, with a lunch break in the middle. Each interview was 45 minutes long, and all had a very similar structure.

Typically, there was one main problem, and the interviewer expected a simple brute-force solution to begin with. Then, I was asked to analyze its performance and try to optimize my solution (or in some cases, scale it up). Finally, I had to implement a solution on a whiteboard.

Some interviewers asked me to implement the brute-force solution first before discussing possible optimizations. Others wanted me to optimize the solution first and then implement one of the versions at the end (they didn't care which version I picked to implement, just wanted to see I could code).

If there was time left, we discussed another, more challenging, open-ended problem (at a high level, just to see how I think), or had time for me to ask questions. The problems were not too hard, but the interviews felt pretty intense overall.

After the interviews, I was contacted by my recruiter the same day. She told me she received some initial feedback, and what she heard so far was really good. In another 2-3 days, she confirmed that the interviews went well and told me she would be preparing my case for a hiring committee. Finally, about two weeks after the on-site interview, she told me they were ready to make an offer.

I can't recall the exact questions, but all problems were related to basic algorithms and data structures.

One problem involved a binary search tree. One involved dynamic programming. One was a two-player game where I had to determine which player had a chance to win. One was about a binary search array. One was related to basic hashing.