I was contacted by an internal recruiter through LinkedIn for a position in either Pittsburgh or San Francisco as part of the Advanced Technologies Group (autonomous vehicles). I had not applied for the role. The recruiter did not request a resume and asked very few questions about me, but pushed to schedule a one-hour phone interview for the following week. The phone interview was with an SRE and consisted of a short coding assignment, followed by an open discussion on web application architecture design.

The following day, I was introduced to another recruiter to schedule an on-site interview in San Francisco, despite my having stated that I was only interested in the Pittsburgh position. The travel arrangements were typical, handled by their agency: two nights of hotel, a flight, $60 per day for meals, and Uber rides from the airport to the hotel and office.

Pre-interview arrival:

• Watched a short video and took a 90-question online personality test (35 minutes).

Interview:

I checked in with the doorman. The interview room was typical, equipped with video conferencing, a whiteboard, and one running red marker.

• The first interviewer was remote and asked me to whiteboard a "moving-target" type software architecture problem.
• The second interviewer was in person and discussed Linux systems and troubleshooting. We had lunch afterward.
• The third interviewer was remote for 45 minutes. He spent 30 minutes discussing his work in an "echo chamber" within a large conference room, followed by 15 minutes about reliably monitoring large data migrations.
• The fourth interviewer was also remote and asked coding questions on the whiteboard, as well as an interactive coding exercise on my own computer, which I had to bring.
• The final interviewer was in person and discussed monitoring.

I felt okay about my responses, but not great. Overall, it was a good experience; everyone was very cool, nice, and accommodating. However, I felt cheated by the number of remote interviews. I missed a day of work and spent over eight hours traveling each way to an office where I would not be working, only to have three out of five interviewers not be present in person.

Design a system to process a large text file produced by a client.

Based on previous experience, design a system to handle 100TB of data per day and operate in a worldwide context.

Linux questions: How to investigate a VM with no SSH access? Step through the process using commands.

One in 20 requests are failing in this stack (drawn application stack containing LB, frontend, backend, DB). Talk me through finding the problem.

Whiteboard an LRU cache in the language of your choice.

(Interactive coding) Find the greatest difference in this array, in the language of your choice.