The Salesforce.com hiring team did an incredible job helping me throughout the entire process. From the first email, sent by a very kind woman, to the second technical call, everything was very good.

The first interview was with a Data Engineering Manager, and it was technically sound. Hadoop, Cassandra, MySQL, HDFS, and HBase were some of the keywords discussed.

I passed this first interview after a 1.5-hour conversation with this very polite Data Engineering Manager.

In less than 24 hours, I received confirmation from the recruiter that I had passed the first round. She then scheduled the second interview with a Lead Member of Technical Staff for a week later.

When the week passed, I spoke for an hour with the Lead Member of Technical Staff. It was challenging, but he guided me so well that I felt confident with him.

Unfortunately, I didn't pass this round. However, they sent me complete feedback on areas where I could improve for future interviews – simply awesome.

The most challenging question was: If you have 10 TBs of unstructured customer data and you need to find clever ways to extract valuable information from it, what do you do? Explain to me at the most technical level you think.