After submitting my resume via Google's career site I heard back from an internal technical recruiter within two weeks. They asked if I could have a phone interview with one of their project managers. I talked with him briefly about the team they were hiring for, and what the responsibilities were. After discussing that it was something I was interested in he asked me to open a shared Google Doc and do some very generic code tests (build a class, add a property, add a method that modifies that property, etc). While it was difficult to write code in a word processor, it wasn't the worst thing I'd been asked to do in an interview. After that call I received an email from the original recruiter stating that the PM was impressed, and that they would like to have me come in to their office in San Bruno for a more thorough interview process. I showed up to the office (which is awesome, BTW), was greeted by the recruiter and sat in one of their many meeting rooms. I was told it was a long and vigorous process beforehand. The first three interviewers were fellow software engineers, people that I'm assuming would be peers if I were to be hired. They asked simple questions like the difference between prototypal and classical inheritance, how to query DOM elements without using libraries like jQuery, and the like. Then they started asking me how I would go about solving problems, mostly to do with performance. The first question I remember was, "We have a lot of videos. Say somebody does a search query, and it returns something like 100,000 videos. How would you go about building an infinite scroll UI of a grid where the grid items were a set size, but the browser is inevitably an undefined dimension?" And then, "Write some test code on the whiteboard." I would write some code, they'd take a picture, erase, repeat. It was very difficult to attempt to build something this way, I would have preferred a Google Doc. Another question was, "Because we serve XX billions of images and videos, we're always looking for ways to cut back on the amount of requests we are processing and keeping bandwidth at the very minimum without affecting experience. How would you do that in the case of the search grid?" I responded with lazy loading the images. "Write some test code on the whiteboard." There was a lunch break in which another guy gave me a tour of the office and then took me to their cafeteria, which was top notch. The fourth interviewer was a UI designer. His questions were more geared toward the designer/developer relationship, and ideas behind how they should work together. He then gave me a sheet of paper with what seemed to be a graph and some copy around it. He asked me how I would build it. Then he asked how I would build it to be responsive. His final question was, "You have a building with 1000 floors. How do you implement an efficient elevator system?" I started by designing a panel for the inside of the elevator, then by structuring the rooms in which the elevators were accessed, then by segmenting them into groups that only went up/down. The last interviewer was a backend engineer (Python, I believe). This guy had some real CS chops. I don't remember the first question he asked me, but the second made me feel like I knew nothing. It was, roughly, "Theoretically, you have a computer that has infinite memory. You have a starting point that is a 0 (zero), and a series of zeros after that. Eventually there will be a 1 (one). You need to write a program to find the index of the first one in relation to the first zero. Go." So I started by saying, "Well, I'm assuming the wrong answer is to linearly go through each character and checking to see if it's a one." He confirmed. I don't remember how I answered, but he asked me to write code for my answer, and we were there for a good 45 minutes on that single question. Finally, the project manager and recruiter came in, talked about the team some more, asked if I had any questions, and that was that.