The recruiter contacted me from the US via stackoverflow or LinkedIn and did a phone screening shortly after. 1 technical phone interview was scheduled with a local Staff Engineer, there was supposed to be another Engineer from the US that did not join. The interview covered general topics for the 1st halve and then followed an unstructured coding exercise using Collabedit, cliche questions about sorting where they were looking for specific implementation like using a heap tree etc... After passing that I got invited to a F2F 3 hours interview at their offices in downtown Toronto. 1st interview with the local office manager (we started late), again it was 1st half generic interview and then followed by another unstructured coding exercise using a laptop and a text editor (not IDE) where you are supposed to explain your thinking/approach aloud as you do it. On the last 5 minutes or so, you are asked you if you have questions for the interviewer. 2nd hour interview the same process, this time with a junior/mid level engineer that was clearly untrained at interviewing as he was struggling to articulate/clarify questions (this was unpleasant) (no breaks) 3rd hour same interview style with a Staff Engineer, same process, better experience, better and harder questions. 2 days or so I got a call from the recruiter telling me they have decided not to proceed with the final step at the company HQ. Although I felt I was fully qualified to do the job well (I know this sounds biased), I know that I didn't play the interviewing game the way the were expecting (overly emphasis on the unstructured coding exercises) and that's entirely on me. Everyone was fairly new at the local job so I guess they will probably get better at this if they get more support from the HQ. All in all, they were all friendly so I would say it was a positive experience despite all. It helped to prepare better for other interviews with a similar style.