The whole interview process was comprised of two phone interviews, and on-site interview. The first phone interview was from an HR, and the second was a technical interview in which I was asked several basic CS problems but no algorithm development or online coding. After that I was invited to fly to Santa Monica, CA for in-person interview. The interview insisted of 5 round of interviews. The content included algorithm, system design, and so on. I though I was doing fine, but after one week, I got a call from the HR told me that I was not accepted due to lacking of working experience. However, the overall process was smooth, the interviewers were nice and friendly. The questions are not really so hard to answer.

Direct onsite because I interviewed in the past and did well that time. From the time I sent my resume to interview day: 2 weeks. From interview day to offer over the phone: 2 weeks. The syllabus for the interviews is very clear and simple: 1) Dynamic Programming 2) Super recursion (permutation, combination,...2^n, m^n, n!...etc. type of program. (NP hard, NP programs) 3) Probability related programs 4) Graphs: BFS/DFS are usually enough 5) All basic data structures from Arrays/Lists to circular queues, BSTs, Hash tables, B-Trees, and Red-Black trees, and all basic algorithms like sorting, binary search, median,... 6) Problem solving ability at a level similar to TopCoder Division 1, 250 points. If you can consistently solve these, then you are almost sure to get in with 2-weeks brush up. 7) Review all old interview questions in Glassdoor to get a feel. If you can solve 95% of them at home (including coding them up quickly and testing them out in a debugger + editor setup), you are in good shape. 8) Practice coding--write often and write a lot. If you can think of a solution, you should be able to code it easily...without much thought. 9) Very good to have for design interview: distributed systems knowledge and practical experience. 10) Good understanding of basic discrete math, computer architecture, basic math. 11) Coursera courses and assignments give a lot of what you need to know. 12) Note that all the above except the first 2 are useful in "real life" programming too! Interview 1: Graph related question and super recursion Interview 2: Design discussion involving a distributed system with writes/reads going on at different sites in parallel. Interview 3: Array and Tree related questions Interview 4: Designing a simple class to do something. Not hard, but not easy either. You need to know basic data structures very well to consider different designs and trade-offs. Interview 5: Dynamic programming, Computer architecture and low level perf. enhancement question which requires knowledge of Trees, binary search, etc. At the end, I wasn't tired and rather enjoyed the discussions. I think the key was long term preparation and time spent doing topcoder for several years (on and off as I enjoy solving the problems). Conclusion: "It's not the best who win the race; it's the best prepared who win it."