I recently completed a 3 week long, 3 round interview sequence for Livio Radio and thought it might be useful for other candidates down the line if I recapped how it went. Livio Radio is no longer an independent startup, having been swallowed up by Ford Motor Company. Livio’s current Ferndale office is in a surprisingly narrow retail space in a strip mall seemingly in the middle of a Ferndale subdivision, but in Spring of 2016 the company is scheduled to be moving into a much larger space in downtown Royal Oak ("it'll have a garage!", one of my potential team mates excitedly told me -- that garage is useful for Livio folks to do testing on prototype cars, radios, bluetooth and beacon setups). Royal Oak will also have a lot more lunch and after-work options close by to the office as well. The way my interview process worked was that I applied to Livio directly and I got a response from some Ford recruiter/screener a few days later who said I would be likely to hear from Livio sometime within 4 - 6 weeks (if this is the standard procedure for all Ford, they're surely missing out on a lots of candidates who don't have the patience to wait around that long). Livio's office manager called me up a few days after that (i.e. within a week of the Ford HR person processing my paperwork) and the official Livio process began with a phone screen. The phone screen was relatively straightforward and I’ve recapped the coding question below. The challenging round will be the 2nd round on-site at Livio, where I got grilled for just over two hours by a lead engineer (who would have been a peer) and a project manager, if I remember correctly. The first question was architectural: how would one design the API (or programming interface) for a deck of cards. While I scribbled out various ideas on the white board, the guys frowned and suggested various possibilities (e.g. “what if we’re not working with 52 cards?” “what if the deck of cards is for a game of Euchre or some other type of card game?”). I was pretty certain I was going to be torpedoed out of the interview at that point but since the office’s Comcast Business Internet was konked out during the time I was there, the questioning continued along the lines of my mobile specialty: what’s the difference between a serial vs a concurrent queue? describe & contrast atomic vs non-atomic properties, etc. I got called back to do the third round at the Ford Talent Center in Allen Park, which is Ford’s centralized location for doing all their Detroit-area interviewing (as far as I can tell). This time I did a panel interview with Livio’s CEO, the feature owner for Ford’s AppLink project and a Chief Product Analyst. The questioning was very structured, with the panel reading questions off a series of paper sheets (which I think is the standard interviewing procedure for all Ford candidates). Besides standard “describe successes you are proud of”, “what’s the worst software bug you’ve encountered and how did you fix it?” questions, technical/logical questions I answered included: “for a given middle school, how many buses will they need to move students most efficiently”, “given a sentence containing different kinds of brackets — e.g. ( { [ ] } ) — describe how one could tell there’s a balance to the number and order of the brackets (the computer sciencey answer would be a simple push-pop architecture, where any mismatch would mean something is left on the stack when the sentence is finished parsing)”. I also was able to ask each of the panel various questions of my own between theirs. If you make it to the offer stage, Ford allows exactly one week for you to make a decision (which is more generous than most other potential employers, who typically demand a response within a couple days). On the other hand, Ford’s salary levels are not as competitive as what I’ve seen with other Detroit-area companies. From what I can tell, I believe Livio’s team & the potentially fun work (e.g. the entrepreneurial & cutting edge work of a start up within the safety and stability of a huge corporation) would make the role really worthwhile. Hopefully my experience with the Livio interview process will help you to prepare to pass your interviewing day. If you find any of the information in this review helpful, please let me know by voting "Yes" on the "Helpful?" question below (this helps to motivate me to be as detailed as possible).