I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at PernixData (San Jose, CA) in Mar 2015
Interview
I was located in the Bay Area so my screening interview was also onsite. It was a one hour interview with the a senior executive at PernixData. The question first involved coding up a problem and then went on to more of a design problem. I think I did fairly well at this as I did receive an invite for onsite.
There were two sets of onsite interviews - 3 hours each.
Each interview focused on different aspects. Kernel space knowledge, synchronization, storage system design, complexity of algorithms, programming questions. Each involved writing code on the whiteboard.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at PernixData (San Jose, CA)
Interview
CTO reached out to me via LinkedIn. Standard Silicon Valley style interview process. Talked to 5 engineers and the CTO. Every engineer had either a coding or design test in different areas. Be sure to understand important data structures like tries, b-trees and hash tables. Operating system, kernel and distributed systems background has to be solid as a lot of questions evolve around concurrency, memory management and cache coherency. Coding is done in plain C or pseudo code for kernel positions. Some algorithms asked are recursive but nothing to be scared of.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Had to design a network storage protocol which could be efficiently implemented using blocking socket IO.