The hiring process was relatively smooth and painless. I found a req, got an email from the hiring manager within a week, and then we had a 30-minute phone interview.

From there, he arranged an onsite interview. The onsite interview was a bit more tedious. I interviewed with the Director, 3 Managers, HR Staff, 2 recent grads, and 2 of their top engineers. I also had to take a written hour-long test (I felt like I was in college).

Overall, the questions were geared to find out who I was and what I was doing at my previous company. The tough questions came towards the end that kind of put me out of my comfort zone. I really liked the people I interviewed with and asked a lot of questions.

From there, about a week and a half of back-and-forth emails with HR, I found out that they were going to extend an offer.

Oh, and they don't base their reasoning for hire just on technical expertise; it's only 1/5th of their overall selection process.

The hardest part of the interview was the impromptu technical questions. They weren't necessarily hard, but they did kind of put you out of your comfort zone. I haven't done any firmware development for hard drive/SSD components, so everything was new to me. Overall, I did "OK."