Contacted by their recruiter and then had a phone interview, which contained quite a few questions on CS fundamental conceptions, design patterns, my experience, current projects and skill set, as well as some linux cmd tricks, pair programming and simple system design question. Later we had a remote onsite, which involved in more pair programming coding test, advanced system designs with kafka and pseudo code (it was strange that I made it clear I had no experience on kafka or other real time system, but to solve that problem you should have a good understanding of kafka), talking about my experience and projects again, and culture fit.

Recruiter contacted me and set up an initial telephonic conversation. Asked questions about my background and tried to sell the company a bit. Nothing out of the blue here. Next up was a visit to onsite to have an initial conversation with the hiring manger/VP. He was a knowledgeable and personable fellow. He explained the details of the position and the team I would join and the challenges/tasks to be done on that team. This conversation helped me understand more about the job which is always important. Onsite is next: - During the course of the interviews I learnt that this team I was interviewing for was NOT the same one I was told about in the earlier visit. NOT cool, only the VP/hiring manager was same but he headed multiple teams. I had to figure this out myself during the process and was never told about it. There were three technical interviews. 1.General discussion about my distributed computing background. 2. More map reduce questions and some typical data structure/coding questions. I remember writing code for at least 2 problems in this interview. 3. A random design problem, very ill defined, I tried to get clarifications on the requirement but that didnt help. Never helps to design anything when you dont know requirements. My gripe with this interview was when you have an open ended question it is upto the interviewer to explain what he/she is really looking for. e.g. interviewer says design a system and candidate puts a queue as a part of his system, its upto the interviewer to either allow use off the shelf queue and move on to other parts of the design or ask interviewee to design the queue itself or question the decision to even use a queue. This was followed by another standard coding question dealing with recursion. Done, now the recruiter comes back in and says things are looking good, general feedback is positive. Asks details about salary expectation etc. All goes downhill after I give him the numbers. He says oh it will be tough for us to match the numbers you are expecting. Well he should have asked me upfront and if they could not afford me both parties could have moved on without wasting so much time. Anyway he continues the conversation for a bit and then sends the VP/hiring manager again to have a chat to me. What annoyed me most was they never got back to me. One phone call to say sorry we like you but we can only offer u X or even an email saying sorry you failed the interview and are not a match would have been acceptable. But to not get back at all to the candidate is just plain awful. Beware of the recruiters here, I feel the engineers are a decent lot but the HR and recruiters leave a lot to be desired.