The interview process consists of five stages:

1. A 30-minute call with the HR recruiter to discuss your fit for the position and the company.
2. A 30-minute call with the VP of Engineering to get acquainted and have a technical discussion about your experience and the team's challenges, mostly personal questions regarding current and previous roles and challenges.
3. A 1.5-hour live coding interview with two senior engineers.
4. A 1.5-hour design interview with a senior engineer.
5. A 45-minute session with a director for personal and some technical questions.

It was not an easy process and certainly took a lot of time and effort. I was disappointed, especially as I passed all the first four stages. The last stage was meant to be personal and to get to know me better during an on-site interview. However, during the interview, the group manager asked a design question, which we discussed for 10 minutes at a high level. I provided a good solution, but clearly, the hiring manager decided that my design skills were not sufficient for this position. This felt unfair, as design capabilities cannot be assessed based on a 10-minute discussion. (It's worth mentioning that the manager did not explain the solution he would have expected, so I truly don't understand why I was rejected).

The call with the R&D VP: A personal question about my work and challenges, and how I overcame them.

The live coding interview: Write Java code for implementing a system with multiple databases representing faculties from different universities, where each student is described in one DB. The system will receive a large amount of data on students' IDs and their faculties and needs to fetch the data from the scattered databases efficiently.

The design interview:

1. Design how to add UPDATE/DELETE capabilities to a DB that only has INSERT capabilities.
2. Design a system with three data storage instances (DB, S3, and data warehouse) that needs to receive an "export all" trigger from the user. The system will then zip all available user data from the three storage instances and send a URL to the user where they can find the exported data.

The director interview: The final interview was meant to be personal, as I said. Its main intention was to meet me in person and give me the opportunity to explore the office as well. The 45-minute interview also included a small design question where you need to design a microservice that fetches data from different providers (like Facebook and Twitter) using API calls and then extracts the data into reports for the customer. This is actually one of Salesforce's systems called Dataroma.