The process was long and arduous. First, got a recruiter screen with typical HR stuff. Then, after about 2 weeks, got a phone screen with an engineer. I needed to write code on a shared document while talking to the guy on the phone. Then the recruiter suddenly changed to a "senior recruiter" and the new one must have been the lousiest senior recruiter they had at the time. He forgot to schedule the onsite, never called or emailed back, rarely picked up the phone when called directly. After more than a month from the phone screen I finally went to the onsite interview. That went fairly well but due to the recruiter not doing his job hiring committee wanted more information. After another month I went back for another onsite. When I heard nothing for more than 3 weeks I asked to change a recruiter. Change was approved and after one more onsite I was extended an offer. Engineers performing the interviews were all professional and nice, no one asked any brain teasers etc. All questions were highly technical, on par with what I expected from reading Glassdoor and other sources. It would be a generally positive experience if it wasn't for the lousy "senior" recruiter.

Direct onsite because I interviewed in the past and did well that time. From the time I sent my resume to interview day: 2 weeks. From interview day to offer over the phone: 2 weeks. The syllabus for the interviews is very clear and simple: 1) Dynamic Programming 2) Super recursion (permutation, combination,...2^n, m^n, n!...etc. type of program. (NP hard, NP programs) 3) Probability related programs 4) Graphs: BFS/DFS are usually enough 5) All basic data structures from Arrays/Lists to circular queues, BSTs, Hash tables, B-Trees, and Red-Black trees, and all basic algorithms like sorting, binary search, median,... 6) Problem solving ability at a level similar to TopCoder Division 1, 250 points. If you can consistently solve these, then you are almost sure to get in with 2-weeks brush up. 7) Review all old interview questions in Glassdoor to get a feel. If you can solve 95% of them at home (including coding them up quickly and testing them out in a debugger + editor setup), you are in good shape. 8) Practice coding--write often and write a lot. If you can think of a solution, you should be able to code it easily...without much thought. 9) Very good to have for design interview: distributed systems knowledge and practical experience. 10) Good understanding of basic discrete math, computer architecture, basic math. 11) Coursera courses and assignments give a lot of what you need to know. 12) Note that all the above except the first 2 are useful in "real life" programming too! Interview 1: Graph related question and super recursion Interview 2: Design discussion involving a distributed system with writes/reads going on at different sites in parallel. Interview 3: Array and Tree related questions Interview 4: Designing a simple class to do something. Not hard, but not easy either. You need to know basic data structures very well to consider different designs and trade-offs. Interview 5: Dynamic programming, Computer architecture and low level perf. enhancement question which requires knowledge of Trees, binary search, etc. At the end, I wasn't tired and rather enjoyed the discussions. I think the key was long term preparation and time spent doing topcoder for several years (on and off as I enjoy solving the problems). Conclusion: "It's not the best who win the race; it's the best prepared who win it."