TLDR: I'm glad I didn't get this position.
The process began with an HR phone screen, followed by a technical phone screen, and another technical phone screen. And finally, an in-person (sort of) interview loop. The whole process from first contact and interview loop was about one month.
The process was unnecessarily complicated. Both technical phone screeners asked duplicate questions. They didn't seem to care about soft skills or project management, which is odd for a TPM position. The questions asked were largely, "how does X work?," where X is HTTPS, firewalls, load balancers, DNS, TCP/IP, and HTTP2. I get the impression they wanted textbook answers.
The in-person interview made me question why I'd want to work for Akamai. I arrived at the Bellevue office 5 minutes early, and the entire office was dead. (There wasn't even a receptionist to greet me.) My first interviewer was 10 minutes late. The following 4 interviewers were conducted over video conference.
Much of the interview revolved around basic networking questions. For example, what happens when I enter an address in my browser and hit enter? How does TCP's 3-way handshake work? What's the difference between SAAS and PAAS? These types of questions make me think they're looking for robots, who can spew textbook answers back at them.
The interviewers clearly had specific answers in mind. For example, one interviewer asked "How would you explain cloud computing to a customer?" This is a very big question. And when I tried asking clarifying questions, my interviewer refused to be more specific. (Am I talking to an end user? A developer? A CEO?)
The biggest insult was that nobody from Akamai bothered to followup with me after the in-person interview. A polite "thanks for coming in" email would have done wonders to convince me that Akamai wasn't staffed by robots.
I have the feeling that the interview closely replicates the experience of working for Akamai: cumbersome, redundant, cold, and off-putting.
