I applied online and was called and emailed by two separate HR members to schedule a phone interview.

The phone interview was about 45 minutes and consisted almost entirely of deep technical questions on operating systems, concurrency, multithreaded programming, and embedded systems concepts.

About a week after the phone interview, I received an email to schedule the on-site interview.

The on-site interview ran from 10:30 AM to 4:30 PM and comprised six total interviews. Five of these were technical, with a mixture of staff engineers, managers, and directors/VPs of engineering.

It also included a lunch interview, where one of your interviewers buys you lunch and conducts a more informal interview while you eat.

The interviews involved a mixture of discussing my past projects, conceptual OS questions, and a large number of C questions. For these C questions, I was either given a code fragment and asked to identify errors or predict output, or asked to write a C function to perform a specific task.

To have a chance at a Software Engineer position here, you need to be really strong at C programming and the C language, including variable scope, keywords, and all kinds of memory allocation. It's much closer to computer engineering than computer science.

The only negatives with the experience were a bit of disorganization. I was contacted by two different HR representatives for the same position, and one of my interviewers did not show up. However, other than that, it was a positive experience.

Write a function in C to merge two sorted arrays into a single sorted array.

Given half a dozen C code fragments, identify the error or explain what the output will be.

DSP questions:

• How an A/D converter works
• What the format of an audio file looks like

Deep dive into architecture/OS:

• How to detect page corruption
• How to find the offset of an element inside a struct without accessing the variable directly
• How to synchronize memory across two CPUs in a cluster.