The process is intense and highly focused on practical engineering rather than just theoretical algorithms. After the initial recruiter screen and a technical phone screen, there was a heavy emphasis on a "Learning Sample" or a take-home style project that you then have to defend in a deep-dive session. They want to see how you handle real-world system bottlenecks, concurrency, and large-scale data ingestion.

One part involved optimizing a distributed system mockup where I had to identify a race condition under high load.

It wasn't about memorizing a textbook answer; it was about live debugging and showing your thought process in a production-like environment.