I applied online, and a recruiter emailed me, stating the hiring team was interested in my candidacy. The hiring manager and a senior developer, who would conduct my phone interview, were CC'd on the email from the recruiter. I was very excited and asked the Senior Developer to schedule the phone interview ASAP (a mistake). The interview was scheduled for five days later and lasted 60 minutes. I was literally sweating from head to toe.

It wasn't that difficult, but the developer asked me about some of my academic projects, which I hadn't prepared for, and posed a system design challenge. I am sure I didn't give him the answer he wanted. He phrased the question in five to six different ways, still not satisfied with my answer. Kudos to his patience.

Finally, we ended the call, and he said the recruiter would get back to me soon.

A week later, the recruiter emailed me, saying the hiring team wanted to fly me to Seattle for an onsite interview. I replied, stating I was ready to fly as early as possible (another mistake), and I was given the date of the last Monday of August, exactly seven days from the day I received the email.

My interview started at 11:30. The first interviewer asked me a couple of very simple data structure questions, and I wrote the code on a whiteboard while thinking out loud. After interacting for an hour, we went to the cafeteria. He then brought me back to the building after we finished eating and left me at the next interviewer's office.

This interviewer was very honest and told me I was the first candidate he was interviewing. He had a couple of C++ pointer-related problems ready on the whiteboard and one SQL question. I struggled a bit in solving them, and the interviewer helped me a lot.

After one hour, I was left at the office of the team manager. She was very sweet and friendly. We talked for 20 minutes about mutual interests and then jumped to system design questions. I wasn't able to cover all the scenarios but discussed the important ones that mattered. She helped me understand the rest.

To my surprise, she mentioned her manager might want to meet me. She dropped me off at the lobby and told me I had a 30-minute break. After 30 minutes, the senior manager took me to her office. It was all about how much I wanted to do the work they were doing, behavioral questions, and again, a system design question. It was all good and easy, to be honest.

I sent an email to the recruiter, asking him to thank the team on my behalf.

Three days later, I received an email from the recruiter stating that I did not have the required years of experience for the job role, and that was the reason the hiring manager had decided not to move forward with my candidacy.

Simple data structure and memory related questions.