Taking advantage of my free month of LinkedIn premium, I sent an InMail to a recruiter working at Tesla, who returned my contact a day or two later. He enthusiastically outlined all the different firmware groups and what they do, and the typical hiring process. We kicked it off by setting a time/date for an e-mail firmware exercise. They were very basic questions, and I had to send a reply with my solutions attached within 30 minutes. My resume and my firmware answers caught the interest of one manager, and so the recruiter set up a phone interview with him a few days down the road. The manager called at the appointed time and we discussed the work I did in my current company. The interview took about 45 minutes, followed by a live coding session over a collaborative browser-based text pad web-app. As luck would have it, we experienced technical issues a few minutes in, and I was allowed do send in a text file much like the firmware exercise! Being the honest guy that I am, I quickly completed it and sent it to the recruiter. The impression from the first interview was quite positive, granting me a second one set a few days later, this time with a senior engineer. We discussed in greater detail about my current employment, as well as projects I had done in school. The recruiter followed up the next day with good news of an almost-all-expenses paid trip to Palo Alto. The on-site interview consisted of a presentation I had to deliver, followed by a series of one-on-ones with 5 engineers/managers, one of which was a chat over lunch. I gave myself a week to prepare the presentation and to brush up on my software engineering skillset. I don't present a lot, so when I queried the audience about time, I was over the allotted duration by 2 minutes, and I wasn't even done yet! Let me just say.. it's a good sign if they allow you to continue and finish. Every one-on-one session had a whiteboard coding component, ranging from writing functions to finding errors in a snippet of code. Difficulty was relatively easy, there were a couple that gave me trouble, though applicants who haven't done more embedded-related type or work will have a harder time. I left the office feeling pretty good, though I spent the next week dwelling on things said and left unsaid. Though through the whole process the recruiter was very polite and professional, definitely unlike the entries I read here from 1 or 2 years ago. He followed up a week after the on-site interview as promised.