I'll start with my summary and get into the process: Do not waste your time like I did. I spent hours and hours on this, and when I got my rejection email they mentioned they're lately getting 50k applications a month. So unless you have some really good reason to think they would want to hire you, like you hack the Linux kernel in your spare time, don't bother. (And even if you do think you're exceptionally qualified, apparently the pay sucks, so consider that you could be making more somewhere else.) After the initial application part, which was fairly lengthy, they sent me a series of essay questions asking about my work history, my academic history, my opinions about Canonical. I literally spent days writing this all up. I didn't mind too much, because I like writing, but there were certainly other things I could have done with my time. Then they sent me what seemed to be an IQ test. (I am pretty sure this is illegal in the US, but maybe it's legal wherever their HQ is.) Then I had three hour-long interviews over the course of a week. One was with a manager person, to give me a chance to ask about Canonical. The rest were a series of increasingly esoteric questions about computer architecture and Linux specifically. A few days, and unsurprisingly, I got a very lengthy rejection email thanking me for my time, where they dropped the number of applicants they were getting. If I had know the massive number I was competing against, I would have assessed my odds as "no way in hell" and spent my time applying somewhere else. Or, in the amount of time I wasted, I could have applied in a couple dozen other places.