1. Call from recruiter, with basic questions about competency 2. Request to apply on job portal for a specific job. 3. Email from recruiter with a ton of preparation material and job expectations. 4. We can choose our own interview dates; we can take a couple of weeks' time for preparation 5. Minimum 3 rounds of technical interview. If you do so bad at any round, then there may not be a further round. 6. System design round. 7. Personality round 8. The final result The overall process is slow and could vary anywhere between 1 - 3 months.

The process took about seven weeks from start to finish. It kicked off with a 30-minute recruiter call where we talked through my background, target teams, and compensation expectations. About a week later I had a technical phone screen over Google Meet with a senior engineer — one medium-hard coding problem on a shared doc, no autocomplete, no run button. I got passed through to the onsite loop, which was five back-to-back virtual interviews on a single day: two coding rounds, one system design, one "Googleyness and Leadership" behavioral, and one coding round that leaned more into problem-solving and edge cases than raw algorithms. After the loop, my recruiter told me packets go to the hiring committee weekly, so I waited about ten days for a decision. Once HC approved me, I did two team match calls — one with a Search Infra team and one with a team working on internal developer tools — and I picked the second. Offer came through roughly two weeks after team match, then negotiation took another week.