The first step involves one or two phone screens, followed by a half-day or more of on-site interviews. The focus is on programming and architecture talent, but the company is also looking for a good cultural fit.

It's important to note that you may be interviewed for a specific function or for general engineering qualifications. In any case, after boot camp, you will be presented to all the groups that are looking for people, and you get to choose your path, so you don't have to have your specific career path chosen before you apply.

The most challenging question was an exercise in designing a system to do spam detection work and describing it in a huge flowchart, as might be done in an early but detailed product planning session. Be prepared to think on large scales.