How do you coach and develop your engineering team?

"The whole process took about three months from the first screen in late November or early December to finishing in mid-March. Apple felt tighter than other companies because I had two real screens before the onsite, and the engineer screen was already basically an in-depth system design round. Every onsite round was tied pretty closely to the actual job on this observability team, especially storage migration, host cost, and working across a matrix organization. The most unusual part for me was the cross-org partnership round with a cost management stakeholder, and the so-called code review that turned into live coding from scratch. After the loop I waited about four weeks and heard they were still interviewing other candidates, which matched the feeling that they were being very selective about exact fit for this role."

"The interview process was very simple. Unlike other software companies there were little technical deep-dives. There were no coding rounds, however there were 2 system designs, 1 behavioral and 1 cross-functional round. Questions were nothing out of the ordinary. Interviews went very well that I landed an offer."

"I got into the process through a referral, but DeepMind recruiting was separate enough that I had to connect directly rather than just apply through the normal Google portal. The process started with a mostly informational recruiter conversation, then two 30-minute hiring manager intros that felt more like early team matching than screening. After that, I had a four-interview final loop, and despite the different titles, most of the rounds were really just AI product cases with some overlap, especially around how I would think about proactivity in Gemini. The weird part was how little the interview titles matched what actually happened, and even the recruiter admitted they were still figuring out a new recruiting system. My biggest takeaway is that this loop felt much less standardized than places like Meta, and they wanted me to go all the way to an actual proposed solution and walk through the UX, not just frame the problem well."

"I interviewed for a Senior Product Manager role on Pinterest's media planner tool, and the recruiter screen was honestly the most important part because it set the tone for everything after that. Instead of making me repeat my resume, the recruiter told me she had already read it and asked what wasn't on the page, which let me position my mix of PM and media planning experience in a much more human way. After that I went through a hiring manager round, a product sense interview, two separate product execution interviews, then a final cross-functional interview and another conversation with the hiring manager. The process felt very thorough for a senior PM role, and the big themes were judgment, execution, segmentation, diagnosis, and how I work with engineering. The strongest signal I got was that they cared a lot about empathy and authenticity, especially because the product was for media planners and they seemed to value people who could really understand that user."