The recruiter contacted me from the US via Stack Overflow or LinkedIn and conducted a phone screening shortly after.

A technical phone interview was scheduled with a local Staff Engineer. There was supposed to be another engineer from the US who did not join.

The interview covered general topics for the first half and then followed an unstructured coding exercise using Collabedit. They asked cliché questions about sorting, looking for specific implementations like using a heap tree.

After passing that, I was invited to a 3-hour face-to-face interview at their offices in downtown Toronto.

• First Interview: With the local office manager (we started late). Again, it was the first half a generic interview, followed by another unstructured coding exercise using a laptop and a text editor (not an IDE), where I was supposed to explain my thinking/approach aloud as I did it. In the last 5 minutes or so, I was asked if I had questions for the interviewer.
• Second Hour Interview: The same process, this time with a junior/mid-level engineer who was clearly untrained at interviewing, as they struggled to articulate/clarify questions (this was unpleasant). There were no breaks.
• Third Hour Interview: The same interview style with a Staff Engineer. It was the same process, a better experience with better and harder questions.

Two days later, I received a call from the recruiter telling me they had decided not to proceed with the final step at the company HQ.

Although I felt I was fully qualified to do the job well (I know this sounds biased), I know that I didn't play the interviewing game the way they were expecting (overemphasis on the unstructured coding exercises), and that's entirely on me.

Everyone was fairly new at the local office, so I guess they will probably get better at this if they receive more support from HQ.

All in all, they were all friendly, so I would say it was a positive experience despite everything. It helped me prepare better for other interviews with a similar style.

Explain some commonly used load balancing techniques.

What is second-level caching using Hibernate?

Produce the n max numbers from a list.

Implement a function for some version of the Levenshtein/edit distance problem.

Some cliché questions about HashMaps.