Recruiter contacted me and set up an initial telephonic conversation. Asked questions about my background and tried to sell the company a bit. Nothing out of the blue here. Next up was a visit to onsite to have an initial conversation with the hiring manger/VP. He was a knowledgeable and personable fellow. He explained the details of the position and the team I would join and the challenges/tasks to be done on that team. This conversation helped me understand more about the job which is always important. Onsite is next: - During the course of the interviews I learnt that this team I was interviewing for was NOT the same one I was told about in the earlier visit. NOT cool, only the VP/hiring manager was same but he headed multiple teams. I had to figure this out myself during the process and was never told about it. There were three technical interviews. 1.General discussion about my distributed computing background. 2. More map reduce questions and some typical data structure/coding questions. I remember writing code for at least 2 problems in this interview. 3. A random design problem, very ill defined, I tried to get clarifications on the requirement but that didnt help. Never helps to design anything when you dont know requirements. My gripe with this interview was when you have an open ended question it is upto the interviewer to explain what he/she is really looking for. e.g. interviewer says design a system and candidate puts a queue as a part of his system, its upto the interviewer to either allow use off the shelf queue and move on to other parts of the design or ask interviewee to design the queue itself or question the decision to even use a queue. This was followed by another standard coding question dealing with recursion. Done, now the recruiter comes back in and says things are looking good, general feedback is positive. Asks details about salary expectation etc. All goes downhill after I give him the numbers. He says oh it will be tough for us to match the numbers you are expecting. Well he should have asked me upfront and if they could not afford me both parties could have moved on without wasting so much time. Anyway he continues the conversation for a bit and then sends the VP/hiring manager again to have a chat to me. What annoyed me most was they never got back to me. One phone call to say sorry we like you but we can only offer u X or even an email saying sorry you failed the interview and are not a match would have been acceptable. But to not get back at all to the candidate is just plain awful. Beware of the recruiters here, I feel the engineers are a decent lot but the HR and recruiters leave a lot to be desired.

Three rounds: 1) Senior engineer, 2) CTO, 3) SVP. No "IQ test" type questions, but rather a qualitative review of past projects and match with current needs. Everyone encountered seemed reasonable, and CTO in particular seemed quite intelligent. The sequence of interviews varied from that originally described, probably in response to a new possible match for my skill set. Prior to the interview, interviewers had researched my background from other sources than my resume.