I applied through a recruiter. The process took four weeks.

The interview process had a lot of steps. It started with a phone screening, followed by a fair amount of administrative work — they asked for degree documents and similar paperwork, which added time before things actually got moving. The bulk of it was on-site interviews focused on backend and system design. There was relatively little LeetCode-style algorithm work compared to what I expected. What they really wanted to see was whether you can reason about problems at scale: how a system behaves as load grows, where the bottlenecks show up, and what tradeoffs you'd make. They also went deep on things I had built previously. Expect to explain your own projects in detail — not just what they did, but why you made the design decisions you made.