I applied through a campus career fair and received an online coding challenge email a week later. All my friends who applied also seemed to receive this challenge. The online coding challenge has two questions: one easy and one medium. I was very careful about edge cases and programming style (maintainability, redundancy, etc.), as this seemed to be important. The recruiter then contacted me a few days after I completed the challenge, informing me that I was in the second cut and that they would schedule a phone screen interview two weeks later.

The phone screen lasted 45-60 minutes (60 minutes for me). A project manager asked about my project experience first, then posed two technical questions. This time, one was medium and one was hard (based on LeetCode.com difficulty ranking). Programming took place on an online editor on HackerRank.com, similar to the coding challenge. I wasn't able to test my code, so I was careful with syntax and made sure to explain how my code worked by walking through small sample cases. I didn't solve the hard question, but I articulated my thoughts clearly and had some good ideas about it. In the end, the manager saved some time for me to ask questions and also asked typical questions like 'Why Zillow?'. I had done my research and prepared for these. As a side note, I made sure to ask questions to clarify specifications in technical questions when they were ambiguous, as this is part of the assessment.

A few days later, the recruiter contacted me saying I had moved forward and they would like to schedule an onsite interview. I postponed the onsite until the next year due to a planned vacation.

I interviewed onsite early the following year. Every interviewee had to sign an NDA. The interview process comprised three back-to-back, one-hour-long interviews with three senior engineers from three different teams at Zillow. The process was the same for all three interviews: the first interviewer asked about parts of my resume he was interested in; then came the technical question(s); finally, there was time for me to ask the interviewer questions. Some interviewers asked an easy question first. In those situations, I managed my time wisely to allocate enough time for the harder question. My major onsite questions were all of hard difficulty. As always, I went through the general idea first, wrote clean code, and worked through small sample cases. I didn't solve all of them but solved the majority. The whole onsite experience was very pleasant. It's recommended to prepare for basic data structures and related algorithms, and to practice many other techniques, especially dynamic programming.

An exciting offer came shortly afterwards, and I accepted it. The entire process was very positive and reflected Zillow's enormous momentum and vibe as a rapidly growing company. I appreciated that my recruiter was very responsive throughout the whole time.

I signed an NDA and cannot disclose.