I was contacted by phone by the HR recruiter to begin the process. I went through an initial phone screen consisting of about 20-30 very, very easy technical questions, though it was quite obvious the recruiter was simply reading a sheet and looking for the written down answer. After this, a more in depth technical phone screen with a lead tech was scheduled. This call took about 30 minutes and covered more in depth but still easy questions. From here, as I was located on the other side of the country, we set up an interview time over Skype. I was on time and ready to go only to never hear anything. After several calls to my recruiter, I finally got a call a few hours later saying that she had totally forgotten about the interview. Great. It was rescheduled for the next day. This interview consisted of the lead tech who had screened me earlier plus another senior technician. The majority of the questions were technical in nature and many were quite difficult. As far as I can tell, this is just to gauge exactly where you're at technically. After about an hour to an hour and a half of this, the first two interviewers left and I had two new guys: a different senior technician and the senior manager for the department I was interviewing for. This interview didn't have as many technical questions, but there were still quite a few. Many of these focused more on personality questions. They seemed impressed and told me that they'd be in touch. A few days later, I was again contacted by the recruiter. She set up another Skype interview with another team that wanted to speak with me. When that day came around, I found myself in front of two senior technicians and a team lead. The majority of the interview came from further technical scenario based questions from the two techs as well as a good chunk of personality/scenario (If you had a problem with a teammate, how would you handle it?) questions from the team lead. The next day, I got a call from the recruiter offering me the position. All in all, it was exactly 14 days from first contact to offer in hand. Including phone screens and Skype interviews, I think I topped 8 hours total time spent. They definitely try very hard to make sure candidates are a good fit.

The interview process was the toughest I've ever been through but it is definitely fair. They want to make sure that you really know your stuff. After the recruiter reached out to me (he was AWESOME!!!) they had me complete an automated skills test on a live system. Hint: Write down all of the tasks that they give you because at the end of the hour the task list will go away but the server will still be up and you can finish your work if you didn't have enough time! The second interview was a live, technical break/fix session with an actual Rackspace employe. It covered many system administration tasks. Make sure you know Apache, MySQL, file permissions including chmod and umask, how Linux boots up, how to change network settings, how to manage the firewall, etc. Apparently, I impressed someone because I was asked to conduct several more Skype video-conference interviews from my home and then was asked to join a different team than I initially was accepted to. All told, the process took about a month but I had very special needs concerning my family and they bent over backwards to accommodate us! I am highly impressed by this organization. I've only been here a few days but I feel like it's already one of the best, if not the best company I've ever worked for, and I've done it all, startup to enterprise.