It was the best interview experience I've ever had. I had two phone interviews and went on site to Santa Barbara on October 2015. The first phone interview was 30 minutes short, to know more about me, my projects and what can I improve/contribute if I join the company (I think this one is typical startup, startups are mostly interested in hiring people that can jump into their work right from the first day). This was to decide which team that I was interested in and since the first interview seemed to like me, he passed my resume to the team that I wanted and let the team interview me on the second phone call. Second phone interview was about 45 minutes, the engineering manager interviewed me. Interviewer asked about projects, why Graphiq and (again) how can I improve their products, and 3 technical questions on algorithm and data structure. No coding, I explained all my answers and approaches over the phone. After the second phone interview, they asked me to send my sample code. After few days, they invited me for on site interview. I went to Santa Barbara, and I was so amazed by the beautiful beaches and mountain ranges. Those stunning views can be seen from Graphiq office as well. I had 5 round of interviews on site: two team leads, one engineering manager, VP Engineering and (surprisingly) 5-10 minutes with CEO. The CEO interview was not initially scheduled, so it was a surprise. After finished all interview rounds, I was invited to Graphiq weekly engineering demo which was cool. I never thought that a company would want to expose their confidential information to attract my interest like this. Their engineering demo is usually demo about their new features, which were not released yet. I was very happy. In the end of the day, I was also invited to the company's "sunset" meeting. We watched sunset together and I was treated like I was already part of the team.

This was the best internship interview process I have ever gone through for a job I did not even receive an offer for. So I definitely think it's worth it for me to reflect on in detail. I won't be mentioning specific technical questions but I'll explain everything else I went through. 1) I applied online and got a response very quickly (1-2 days) about setting up a phone interview. The phone interview was a mix of behavioral and technical questions related to a subject I claimed to be strong at. 2) Next, I was given up to two weeks to do a coding challenge related to path-finding and graph exploration, a variation of TSP. They provide a little GUI to test your solution which was very cool and helpful. This took me around 20 hours to research, implement, test, and optimize. It should take less if you are more experienced. 3a) Second round phone interview was with a couple members of the engineering team. More behavioral and technical questions related to DS/Algorithms. Being interested and passionate about the things they do there is very important to them. 3b) I had to provide written feedback of how I felt the interviews were going. 4) They flew me across the country to their office in Santa Barbara! Everything was paid for me and I really wasn't expecting a start-up on start-up funding to do this for an intern candidate. There were 5 rounds of interviews at their office back-to-back. Pretty much all of them were a mix of behavioral and technical. 4a) First interview for me was 2-on-1, behavioral with website front-end technical questions. I blanked out so hard on how jQuery syntax worked which probably cost me the job, so make sure you know your syntax! 4b) Second was another 2-on-1. General DS/Programming Languages questions. This went fairly well for me. They essentially want to know if you know the capabilities encompassing each programming language on your resume. 4c) Third was the last 2-on-1. Talked with the creator of the coding challenge I did earlier about how I could have made my solution better, etc. Also did an algorithms question on linked lists. Ironically, this was the one question I have actually seen before and yet I managed to mess it up on the whiteboard. Practice writing out code by hand. It's surprisingly much more different than you think. 4d) Fourth was with the lead engineer. We talked a little bit and he gave me a logic puzzle to solve. I worked out the math theory behind it and was coming up with the implementation algorithm when I ran out of time. 4e) Last interview was with their CEO, Kevin O'Connor. I wasn't expecting their CEO to interview an intern candidate at all so this was a nice surprise. We had a nice conversation about his company and I got the sense he really wants you to prove that you're worth it to his company. 4f) Bonus! Went out to lunch with 2 more members of the engineering team. Was awesome talking to them in a relaxed atmosphere and they even drove me to the airport. Alas, I did not receive an offer but that was definitely my own fault for not preparing as much as I should have in the subjects on my resume. I spent too much time learning arbitrary CS topics not on my resume in fear of not being able to cover the entire spectrum of questions I was expected to answer. For example, the job description included a preference for PHP on Nginx. I did not know Nginx so it wasn't on my resume. I spent a day implementing Nginx and learning about FastCGI and stuff when ultimately I wasn't asked a single question on PHP, Nginx, or the back-end. The better solution would be for you to know what you're good at, and ensure you excel at those subjects. All in all, this was one of the best interview experiences I have ever had. I traveled, talked to a number of really great people, and learned so much. The questions asked were completely fair and focused on my experiences. They never took more than 2 days to reply to me. I really did not expect them to go in such depth for engineering internship candidates. It really shows how high the bar is for the employees they have there.