Started off normal with a recruiter, but it got really weird when I got to the second interview, which was with the hiring manager. He seemed really uninterested from the start and was cold throughout. He was extremely pedantic about my current role and constantly questioned design choices (mind you this was for my first job out of college, when I had no ability to influence decisions in). He also sounded disappointed when I didn’t have much of an experience in security already (why would a junior dev job need any prior experience?)

phone screen followed by a full loop in San Francisco in HQ. It was full day with 5 interivews. I spent the night at a hotel close by and was flown out the next day. The interview process was as expected with some white board coding and design questions as well as a break for a very delicious lunch.

Recruiter reached out to me via LinkedIn. 1 brief conversation and 2 technical phone screens later, I was brought onsite. The candidate gets to dictate how long/short the process needs to take; in my case, I decided to let it span over a period of 1.5 months. Phone screen questions were relatively straightforward: PhoneScreen1: 1. Add 2 large numbers represented as linked lists and return the resulting linked list 2. Check if a binary tree is a valid BST PhoneScreen2: 1. Implement a caching layer for a web application 2. Talk about your favorite unix utility (i spoke about grep, where it shines, and what its limitations are) Onsite Interview: Round1: Implement a scalable service that counts the frequency of words present in tweets. Round2: Talk about an exciting personal cs project. You are given a 2D integer matrix and the "contours" of a space inside that matrix. Count the sum of all cells inside that space within O(1) time using some clever pre-processing. Round3: Join the siblings of a binary tree that does NOT have any parent pointers. Round4: Design a scalable architecture that broadcasts tweets from can account for heavy-hitters (celebrities) and normal users with fewer followers. Implement merge sort for a singly linked list. Round5: I don't remember the question clearly, but it was along the lines of an array with several elements and needing to create a high-value "chain" by connecting an element with other adjacent elements that are at least 1 hop away from each other. For example: consider an array like [12,5,14,15,8,10]. We can form an allowed chain by combining 12, 14, 8 (total weight is 34). But the best chain to be formed here is 12, 15, 10 (total weight is 37).