I was referred by a current employee and was able to bypass the phone screen. They were very flexible with scheduling. Wanting to study a bit more, I scheduled an onsite interview (the first of two) about a month out.

I received an offer for another software engineering job. Upon notifying my recruiter, we were able to combine the two-hour and three-hour interviews into a single, five-hour interview on one day.

At the onsite, there were four interviews total:

• The first was a design question, intentionally severely underspecified. I had to design object-oriented data structures and an algorithm to solve the problem. Once I solved it, the interviewer upped the difficulty by changing the problem parameters, asking, "What if the entire input won't fit into memory/on a single machine?" This pattern was typical throughout the day.
• Two of the remaining interviews were typical algorithms questions, such as those seen in "Cracking the Coding Interview."
• The last was a distributed systems design problem with no programming. I had to design a system from scratch, focusing on scalability, reliability, and performance.

Once the interviews were over, I had to wait about a week for the hiring committee to meet. I'm not sure how much this process was sped up by already having another offer. The committee met and gave the thumbs up. This wasn't an offer, but according to the recruiter, it was almost as good.

I then met with the managers for three teams that were potential starting teams. These meetings were only 30 minutes, so it was tough to decide. I then ranked the teams in order of my preference and sent that to the recruiter.

I had to wait for the compensation committee, which was about another week later (six days, I think). I then received the official offer and start project details over the phone from my recruiter and via email.

They gave me five days to respond, although I'm guessing this would have been flexible. I accepted the offer after picking a start date.

1 OO design/algorithms question

2 algorithms questions

1 system design question