Multiple interview rounds. system design and some hard level algorithm questions. it was a smooth process. they match you up with pretty good interviewers. it is a privilege to interview at that level.

I had sent my resume to Google for management position but when I received a call from Google recruiter she asked me if I am willing to consider Senior Staff engineer position given that my background had start-up founder and CTO level experience. She then told me that she can arrange me to talk with hiring director to find out more. I agreed to that. Then interview call was arranged. I was surprised to find that it was not with hiring director but with another manager in the organization. His main focus was about why I changed or left some of the companies that I had worked for. It kind of felt odd. After that I felt they will reject me. To my surprise the recruiter called and said your interview went well, do you want to proceed with on-site interview?. She gave me a bunch of details for interview preparation which was very good. She told me the format that some interviewers will be focused on leadership and some focus on architecture and two interviewers will focus on coding. She also told me that if you had one bad interview it doesn't mean the end of it. For coding interview the recruiter told me that they will focus more about your thought process and how you come up with solution to problem and not on completing the coding question. During the interview process, everyone was very professional and well behaved. During leadership interviews, I was asked about different leadership experiences and challenges and I explained in great detail so I though I did well in that. In the architecture interview also I was asked about problems that I had come across and solved earlier in my career so I was sure my answers were correct. In coding interview, the interviewer asked me a coding question that was not possible to be completed in 40 minutes but I walked him through various different ways of solving the problem while I was writing code and we discussed pros and cons of that etc. So I thought everything went well. I was very positive after the interviews that I will get an offer. To my surprise, the recruiter called and said I am being rejected. She refused to disclose the reason. When I pressed, she would only say that technical interview was the reason !!. This surprised me. I talked to an old co-worker of mine who works for Google and asked him if there is anyway, I will know the reason because I was sure I gave correct answers in technical interview. He said, no they will never disclose but when something like this happens, there is a strong possibility that Google recruiter talked to some current Google employee who may have worked with me in the past in another company and that Google employee said something negative about me.