I applied online. I interviewed at Google in Jan 2015
Interview
Was contacted by email by HR. Didn't ask how they found me but I guess its because of my candidate account in their job website + a lecture they gave in my University in which CV were requested for registration. I started the process and halted in the beginning since I didn't have enough time to prepare. At first there was a general conversation about my willing to relocate to another country and it seemed they put effort in making sure you understand that SRE is different than a regular SW eng. (send you many video and blog links about what is the job). The second step was a technical talk with the HR representative with general programming and data structure questions, they were pretty much identical to what I read on Glassdoor before. Although they weren't so hard. The next step was suppose to be a serious technical phone talk with an engineer but I postponed it because I am currently busy. They said its not a problem and we could continue the process in a few months. The thing that caused me to postpone is the list of study material they sent me for the interview. It was long and included books and online courses. I realized I won't have time to prepare for this a kind of thing shortly.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Simple questions such as maximum length of binary tree (n, as it could be unbalanced).
I applied through other source. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Google
Interview
The hiring process was fairly straight forward. I was approached by a recruiter on linked in, who saw that I would be a good fit of a position in several locations. I had to pass a very brief introductory round of questions by this recruiter, which was painless if you had the experience for the job required. They did not ask questions out of the blue and you are given the opportunity to look over the information before you get asked. I would take the opportunity to look over the information provided, don't just jump into the interview without reviewing other posts here.
I got past the initial round and then it was onto the technical review by another current site reliability engineer. It is part of their job to consistently get involved in bringing in new talent and I enjoyed that knowledge.
I feel that the questions where fair and that you had plenty of time to prepare if you had not been on the market for a while, like myself. I unfortunately did not get asked to attend an in-person interview because I lacked some specific knowledge they were looking for on the inner workings of the linux operating system.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Not to be specific, but understand how process control works in Linux. Know your signals and how job scheduling is handled in the most recent iterations. Do not be content in older knowledge of how things work.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Dublin, Dublin) in Oct 2012
Interview
After a short phone screener, the recruiter scheduled a longer phone interview with me. The phone interview was okay. It felt like the guy was expecting a very specific solution, and unhappy that I didn't give the "correct" answer. Afterwards, the communication broke down. There were various delays in getting back to me with feedback. Overall I was not happy with the process.