interviewed for a senior platform/infra role out of the Santa Clara campus, remote-friendly but technically HC-approved for hybrid. here's the actual shape of it:
recruiter screen (30 min) - standard. is your visa okay, are your salary expectations in range, what's your timeline. she was efficient, not warm, moved on quickly.
hiring manager call (45 min) - this one surprised me. it was more strategy than technical. she wanted to know how i'd think about platform tooling adoption across teams that don't have to listen to me. very large-org problem.
technical panel (3 rounds back-to-back, same day) - one coding (graph traversal, medium-hard), one systems design focused on internal developer platforms, one behavioral with two senior engineers. the behavioral was the most rigorous of the three. they dug into a conflict i had with a product team for 25 minutes.
architecture deep-dive (separate round, added after) - one-on-one with a principal. this felt like a rubber-stamp but she had sharp questions about tradeoffs in distributed caching.
total time from recruiter ping to final round: 5 weeks. another 3 weeks for the offer. i did not accept (comp). but the process itself was fair and professional. nobody tried to trick me.