Pretty standard interview process for a big tech company:

• Screening interview: This is a Hangouts call with a recruiter. They'll go over your CV and ask open-ended questions about you and what makes you tick. They focus on understanding your personality and ask behavioral questions.

• 1.5-hour Hangouts interview: This interview is with two backend engineers. You'll encounter trivia engineering questions, be asked to describe a previous engineering project in detail, and solve a programming task using a shared coding pad. They want to see how comfortable you are solving a task and expressing your ideas during the process.

• Full-day on-site interview: This consists of four interviews plus one lunch interview.

They send you the agenda in detail and the interviewers' names well in advance, ensuring you're prepared.

At the beginning of the day, a recruiter will greet and welcome you, making sure you're comfortable and ready to start the day.

Each interview round on-site consists of two people: a leader and a shadow.

• Culture fit interview: They'll try to understand your personality, your way of interacting with people, and how you tackle everyday issues like conflicts or reaching agreement.

• Live coding interview: You'll be given a laptop and asked to perform both a code review and solve another coding problem. This is similar to the previous 1.5-hour online interview, but the task will be more advanced.

• System Design interview: You'll be presented with an open-ended problem and asked how you would build and scale it. They value how you explain your approach from a high-level perspective down to internal details.

• Use case interview: You'll be placed in the context of a large system outage and engage in role-playing. You'll have an hour with the engineers to figure out how to diagnose and locate the issue, and then find a way to fix it. You'll be given tools and information based on the type of outage. You'll need to explain your actions and your thought process. You'll receive feedback on your actions and guidance towards the correct path.

The lunch interview is with other engineers from the company. This is a perfect opportunity to gain insights into the company culture and ask any questions you may have.

They try to align interviewers with potential teams you could work with. Although they remain open-minded throughout, they will consider you for other teams that don't conduct core technical interviews if you demonstrate strong culture fit.

I must say, the on-site was pretty intense, and each part was meticulously designed to extract the exact information they needed. It was a challenging process, but overall, it felt fair and enjoyable.

How do you make people accept your ideas?

How does a Garbage Collector work?

How does the JVM work?

Use a case where you had to debug a system outage with the same tools and information they had at that time.