I was contacted by Citrix R&D HR on 26th May 2014, in the middle of my Gym session, expressing their interest in interviewing me for the post of Senior Software Engineer and saying I was shortlisted for the position. This doc was sent to me as the job description in the formal email communication. I was told that I would be talking to my hiring manager from London over telephone the following day (I will not disclose any names here). I gathered from the HR that this post was for team leading and managing the development of their hypervisor Xen Server and Xen Cloud platform (both of which are merging and now completely open source) which they were intergrating with Apache CloudStack . As would anyone I obessed over glassdoor reviews for Citrix Bangalore over the next few days.

As informed to me the hiring manager promptly called me at the scheduled time. The discussion was mostly around understanding my background, what I have worked on and to what depth do I understand what I claim to know on my Resume. The interview lasted around an hour in a very relaxed chat which was mostly one way. At the end he told me that in his mind I was a good fit for the position and I would be moving to the next round.
The HR called back the next day and scheduled the next round with my hiring managers boss (who is a Director at Citrix). Again, the gentleman called me at the scheduled time. This was more a technical round and I was asked mostly around OS internals kernels, drivers, bootup, caching etc and some bit about data structures. We exchanged some information about his strategic vision for the team in Bangalore and the products they work on. He was very impressed with the way the interview went except from what I understand, my lack of long term experience. He gave me the green as well and I was to head into the third round, the coding round.

At this point we head back into my "The Longest Week" ordeal. The 2 coding rounds were scheduled on back to back days and were to happen via Citrix GTM online meeting. My hiring manager would be an observer in both the meetings.
The first coding round was with a principle architect of Xen Server. We started the video conference and screen share with brief intro's followed by C programming questions to do the following:

Input                 Output
Hello World       dlroW olleH
Hello World       olleH dlroW
Hello World       World Hello

I believe the juding was based on elgance of writing clean and efficient code. Second part of the interview was somewhat more challenging. I was given O'Caml function (Citrix writes their tools for Xen in O'Caml) and asked to decipher what the function does. Once I got that right I was asked to modify the function to do another similar task. O'Caml is a functional programming language like Haskell and some of that padadigm has flown into some python funtions and methodology which helped me decode the O'Caml code though I took some time. Nevertheless, I was given the green for my next round

The fourth round was around leadership, soft skills and technical oral questions with another manager and senior member in Citrix. The round was challenging because I knew the were closing observing every answer and trying to count my answers. The were trying to understand if I have a vision in technology to be able to lead the team and we wavered off serveral times to topics of interest and trends in technology. The last 15 mins was "ask us anything" discussion were I tried to be smart and ask questions like what do you envision my role will be in your vision for the next 6 months, what is the percentage of time on a give week me and my team would spend between sustainance and new development etc.

I will end the article here as I have no further interest in pursuing this opportunity in light of my admission into MS Research Program as CSA Department of IISc, Bangalore.