Google internal recruiter initiated process. Role fit discussion followed by a standard technical phone screen. On-site interview was standard Google 5-session interview loop. Two remote follow-up interviews to dig into more detail as well as two discussions with different teams for best team fit. Total interview time was a bit longer than normal given my own schedule. Overall take-aways: 1. Google goes out of their way to prepare you for this interview. Especially for SRE, they want to keep the bar high but also give you ample opportunity to understand what the interview is and prepare for it. 2. Even though this was a management role, it was the most technical interview I've been given in my career. Not the hardest - but the most in-depth. 3. I found everyone extremely pleasant to work with and nothing confrontational; they want candidates to succeed but they also keep the bar high. 4. Despite the obvious fact that whiteboard coding interviews tell you almost nothing about a candidate's ability to write software, Google still uses them, so you may as well learn to master them; practice before the interview, frequently, so you are comfortable with the whiteboard process.

I had two interviews in one day, the first one was about team management and the second one was coding, the coding interview was somehow easy, I was asked to write a small function like the tail utility in Unix/Linux but the issue that I wasn't sure about what parameters read and seek functions take in c++, so I wrote half a program. It was my mistake, during the preparation, I didn't focus in files/streams, I thought questions would be focused on algorithms. I will give it another try very soon.