Applied for a senior SWE role on their reader experience team. Process took about 5 weeks start to finish, which is actually fine by big-tech standards.
Rounds: Recruiter screen (30 min, straightforward, she was very prepared and honest about the team's pace) Technical screen with a senior eng (45 min, one medium-hard DSA problem on graphs, no LC grind energy though, they wanted me to talk through edge cases rather than just arrive at an answer) Virtual onsite, 4 rounds: system design, coding, cross-functional behavioral, and a "tech and journalism" round where a VP asked how I think about building systems that serve journalists under deadline pressure.
The system design round was probably the most interesting thing I've done in interviews this year. They gave me a scenario involving surfacing personalized article recommendations during a breaking news event, when normal recommendation logic kind of breaks. We talked about fallback strategies, editorial override hooks, real-time signals. It wasn't a rote "design YouTube" situation.
The behavioral round was thorough. Two interviewers asked back-to-back questions about cross-functional conflict, ambiguous requirements, and times I'd pushed back on product decisions. Have your STAR stories ready.
Offer came back about 8 days after the final round. I didn't take it (comp gap vs. what I was targeting) but the process itself was one of the better ones I've been through.