A Yandex recruiter contacted me several months ago about two positions: Software Engineer for a customer-facing product and Systems Programmer for internal systems. I decided to try.

The process took less than a month.

After resume checks, the recruiter offered to proceed with a Skype interview. The interviewer was very friendly, but despite my preparation for a coding interview, most of the questions were about Linux (classic questions on how to find a CPU consumer or get rid of zombies/uninterruptible tasks).

Less than a week later, I was invited to an on-site interview (and Yandex paid for a one-day trip to Moscow). It included four hours of interviews for the Systems Programmer position, one bonus interview from another product team, and one hour dedicated to dinner with the recruiter.

The first three hours were devoted to coding. You would be expected to implement a simple algorithm or a C++ utility class, like a very special type of iterator. I utterly failed the third one, but the interviewer was very helpful and I finally produced the seemingly right code (even with a 15-minute overtime).

The following two interviews were much easier: a little bit of code fixing and coding, large system design (again, no very specific or hard problems here), and lockless structures.

Find an unusual null behavior in my own code.