I interviewed for a system software position, which means writing software for their datacenter/server infrastructure. It was mostly low-level OS type stuff.

I was first contacted by a company HR/Recruiting person. This person was very nice and helpful. They scheduled the interviews and stayed in touch with me on the results of each.

The first phone interview was with an engineer on the team and lasted about an hour. He first asked some basic concept questions about threads vs. processes, virtual memory, interprocess communication, and synchronization.

Then he had me get on my computer and log into Google Docs. There, he pasted in some code that had gibberish variable and function names and asked me to figure out what it did and fix any bugs.

After that, they set up a second phone interview. Apparently, they would normally bring someone on-site after they did well on the phone interview, but since I wasn't local, they called me a second time.

I spoke with another engineer on the team. He chatted with me about my current work and probed into the technical and team aspects. Then, he had me write an algorithm (a list searching and sorting problem) over the phone.

He had me revise my solution a number of times to make it faster, asking about Big O runtime and memory usage at each stage. I was nervous during this part, froze up a bit, and ended up not being invited for further interviews.

The recruiter contacted me about this promptly, so I wasn't left hanging. Overall, I thought it was a good interview process.

They asked me not to share detailed interview questions, but I'll say it was a question about searching and sorting a list. It also covered how to make it faster, and then even faster.