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Google Interview Experiences
3935 interview stories from candidates at 857 companies: how each round went, what was asked and how it ended. Every company page links to practice questions in the same style.
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103 results
- A Huge YAML Merge Problem and a Knapsack That Wants QuickselectGoogle · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Oct 2026
The first-round interviewer was really nice, but the problem was super long. Reading and understanding the problem plus the examples can take maybe 20 minutes. Roughly, it is merging two trees (YAML files), where every node has merge rules, and there are a lot of rules. The approach is DFS plus rule matching. The second-round interviewer gave me a knapsack problem, but for this one DP or DFS with…
- Back-to-Back Phone Screens: Behavioral, Then an HTTP RouterGoogle · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026
After I finished the psychological test, they scheduled my phone interviews right away. It was two rounds back to back, 45 minutes each, and I don't know if that's normal. The first round was a behavioral round with a really nice interviewer. All the questions were the usual ones: what do you do if you disagree with a coworker, what do you do if you disagree with another team, what do you do if a…
- In-Person Onsite with a Design Round and a Train Schedule QuestionGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2026
The onsite was in-person (but virtual was an option) and only two rounds. I only had 4 interviews total with Google. Onsite was solutions design and Leetcode question. Solutions design question was design a review ingestion platform for an e-commerce site that takes reviews and summarizes them with an LLM for an internal dashboard. Focus on trust and safety, prompt injection, data sanitization, P…
- 10-Minute Resume Grill, Then First Missing Positive in O(1) SpaceGoogle · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
The interview started right on time and went straight into an intense 10-minute resume grill. The interviewer homed in on my recent backend work, specifically asking detailed questions about the Kafka streaming architecture and Redis caching implementations from my previous internship in the Platform Cloud org. They also dug into the technical trade-offs I made when building Bastion, focusing hea…
- An Unexpected Forecasting Question and a Fast Offer TimelineGoogle · Data Scientist · Onsite · Sep 2026Offer
I signed Google's offer a couple of days ago, though I still have a few other issues to resolve. I'm sharing my interview experience and preparation package, and hoping I can start smoothly. First round Stats: Questions about p-values, simple linear regression, confidence intervals, and similar topics. Data: Compare two vendors' models. There are similar questions in other interview reports. Seco…
- Behavioral Plus a %KEY% Env-Var Parser, Rejected After R1Google · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
Background 2.5 years of experience, Java backend at the "banana" company. Timeline 5/7 mass-applied to SWE III - Bay Area 7/8 xWF reached out (I did the GHA last year and then got rejected at the resume stage, so this time it was skipped entirely) 8/5 R1 day R1 was all on one day: 45 min behavioral + 45 min technical. Behavioral Self-intro first, then pretty common questions. The main ones they a…
- findBestAnagram, Three BQs, Downleveled from L5 to L4 After R1Google · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Sep 2026In progress
Coding: findBestAnagram For details, see these two posts on LeetCode Discuss: a Google L3/L4 phone screen post Round 2 of a Google SWE II (L3) post BQ: Conflict: Tell me about a time you have to compromise, and how will you act differently after it. Are you satisfied with the result? Did you do anything to make it happen later? Imagine you’re part of the Google Photos team, and your feature detec…
- Four Team Matches and a Verbal Offer After a Long LoopGoogle · Engineering Analyst · Onsite · Sep 2026Offer
A friend started referring me around September 2025. I had a recruiter screen in October, but the HM decided not to interview me. A team I applied to in February this year offered me an interview. The rough timeline: 3/9/2026 Recruiter reached out. 4/2/2026 RRK case, interviewed by a team member. 4/9/2026 Passed. 4/27/2026 RRK case + SQL, interviewed by a team member. 5/11/2026 Passed. 5/22/2026…
- L4 Most-Active-User Coding Went Fine, Rejected After a Relentless BQ RoundGoogle · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
Coding: There are different messages, undirected (A, B). I had to write a method register to store these messages, and another method mostActiveUser() that computes and returns the person who has messaged the most users. I clarified the problem, used a hashmap, and finished writing it quickly. For space complexity I said O(N) at first, but he pointed out that every key maps to its own set, and I…
- L4 Timeline, Meeting Rooms II, and an Offline-Sync Design RoundGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
07/27: got the questionnaire 08/11: recruiter connected 08/24: R1, and R2 got scheduled the same day 09/17: R2 Coding 1: Meeting Rooms II Coding 2: Jump Game Design: design the client-side part of a system where users can edit some data. The network isn't always reliable, so while editing it needs to support local storage, and sync the edits with the server once the network comes back. There can…
- Mouse, Cheese and Cat Grid Path, a Googlyness Manager Question, and a Non-Axis-Aligned Max RectangleGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Phone Interview 1 Warmup Question: Given an N x N grid with a start cell S and a target cell T, where some cells are impassable water. You can only move horizontally or vertically. Determine whether a path from S to T exists. Main Question: Given an N x N grid. A mouse starts at S and the goal is the cheese at T. The grid also has impassable water cells and a cat C. The mouse can only move horizo…
- Phone Screen, Googlyness, and Two Graph-Heavy Onsite RoundsGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Phone Interview Given an n x m matrix, the start is (n-1, 0) and the end is (n-1, m-1). The allowed moves are up-right, right, and down-right. Count the total number of paths to the end. Follow-up 1: There are some checkpoints in the matrix. Count the total number of paths that visit all of the checkpoints. Follow-up 2: The checkpoints must be visited in order. Given that every move changes the c…
- Round 2 With Two Coding Questions and a URL RouterGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Coding 1: LeetCode 210. The follow-ups were all very easy: Add a validity check Time/space complexity Test cases Change the output to a nested list Coding 2: Implement a URL request handler router that needs to support two functions: processHandler(String handler): registers a handler, for example /users/delete or /users/{userId}/photo/{photoId}. getHandler(String url): takes a real URL, for exam…
- Two OA Questions: Score Buckets and Reading Chapters by DayGoogle · Software Engineer · Intern · Online Assessment · Sep 2026
Question 1: Given an array of integers (vector of ints), the index represents a student ID and the corresponding value is that student's score on the exam. The grading criteria are as follows: failed 80%: pass with distinction Return an array of 3 elements, representing the number of students who failed, the number with a regular pass, and the num…
- Two Onsite Coding Rounds and Communication FrictionGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026In progress
r1 Given a connections array, where connections[x] is a list representing the neighboring nodes of x in a graph, and a broken value representing a damaged node, return the minimum number of nodes that must be traversed from start to destination without passing through broken. The solution could use DFS or BFS. I used DFS. The follow-up allowed traversal through broken nodes. r2 Implement a word p…
- An L4 Loop Downleveled to L3Google · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026In progress
I recently interviewed for Google L4 R1 and R2. After the interviews, I was downleveled to L3. Round 1 Coding: Given a file system containing directories and files, where each file has a size and each directory contains files or another directory, calculate the total entity size for a given ID that may identify either a directory or a file. It was somewhat like a wrapped version of LeetCode 339.…
- An Unconventional Python Tee Iterator QuestionGoogle · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
Not sure if I just had bad luck, or if the L5 question bank is just different, but I got hit with a really unconventional question. No small talk, no self-introductions, straight into the coding problem. The task was to implement Python's tee iterator — you're given an iterator and need to return n independent iterators from it. I had to define my own functions and classes for it, so it had a bit…
- Failed System Design, Retake Passed, Now in Team MatchingGoogle · Engineering Manager · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026In progress
I'm currently a founding engineer at a startup, and with the company's prospects looking shaky I decided, on a whim, to put in an application for an Engineering Manager job at Google. I wasn't counting on an offer. My understanding is that most people need a few tries before they get through Google's interviews, and I hadn't prepared at all before applying, so I was starting from behind. That dro…
- Five Onsite Rounds Where Follow-Ups Decide EverythingGoogle · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026
I've been lurking for a long time, and this time I picked up a lot of good material from the forum before my own interview, so I'm posting this to give back. I'm using the forum's usual numeric code-names for the problems, so bear with me. Google's pacing is very different from Meta's. Each round is 45 minutes with basically one main question, and the rest of the time is all follow-ups — the inte…
- Four Interviews Across Months and Unfinished Team MatchingGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026In progress
I applied to Google quite a while ago, probably in March, and got an interview in May. The process dragged on for a long time. I kept practicing problems, and fortunately I eventually passed, but unfortunately team matching didn't work out. I've now gone to NVIDIA. The first round was online in May. It was a coding question, roughly like this (I asked AI to summarize it): Connected Crop Arrangeme…
- Google and Netflix L4 Offers Lost to a Visa ProblemGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026Offer
TL;DR: There is no big-tech name on my resume and my job title is unremarkable, yet I made it through the Google, Netflix and Meta processes and ended up holding L4 offers from Google and Netflix. My visa status ultimately wrecked both. Below is how I got ready. About me: I was a government contractor for eight years. The job was nothing exciting, but I kept teaching myself new technologies and s…
- Google SWE III Onsite Experience and Team Matching TimelineGoogle · Software Engineer III · Aug 2026
I interviewed for a Google Software Engineer III position. The process included two virtual interviews followed by two onsite interviews. The first virtual round focused on Googliness and behavioral questions. I structured my answers using the STAR framework, and the recruiter later said the feedback was extremely positive. The second round was coding-focused and involved an array problem. I comp… Onsite 1 by Xiaoming
- Grid Signals and a Blocker-Removal Follow-upGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
Given a grid representing a city, it contains the following kinds of entities: Sources (S): Emit signals. Blockers (B): Block signal propagation. Empty cells (.): Signals can pass through freely. Targets (T): Need to receive a signal. Signals start simultaneously from all sources. Each unit of time, they move one cell in each of four directions: up, down, left, and right. Signals cannot pass thro…
- L4 Phone Screen and Three Onsite Coding RoundsGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
Phone Interview Given a binary tree representing reporting relationships in a company, where each node represents an employee and its parent represents the employee's direct manager, write an algorithm to find the nearest common manager of a given set of multiple employees. This is a variant of Lowest Common Ancestor. There are K employees in the set and the tree height is H. Optimize the time co…
- L4 Virtual Onsite, 12 Minutes of Coding on a Vague String-Templating QuestionGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
First round VO, coding — the interviewer gave me this question: given a KV map and a string where keys are marked as indices, replace the parts of the string wrapped in %% with the corresponding value from the KV map: {USER=>admin, HOME=>/%USER%/home} Input: I am %USER% My home is %HOME% Output: I am admin My home is /admin/home Then he had me come up with edge cases. My first thought was: if we…
- Phone Screens Then Three Onsite Rounds Including an AI Agent Rate LimiterGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
Phone Screen 1: Coding — Car Rental Optimization Given N cars and a set of rental requests, where each request has pickupTime, returnTime, and id, you need to assign cars to these requests to maximize vehicle utilization while using as few cars as possible. The same car can serve multiple requests as long as their times don't overlap. If one request returns the car at time 5 and another picks up…
- Three-Part Hiring Assessment on Work Style and EthicsGoogle · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
These are the latest Google Hiring Assessment questions I had just finished. They were all questions I actually received. This time I took the new version of the Google Hiring Assessment. There was no coding, and it mainly had three parts. Part One: Most Like Me / Least Like Me Each question gave three statements. First I chose the one most like me, and then I chose the one least like me from the…
- Agentic System Design and a Coding Round That Turned Into 2D DPGoogle · Forward Deployed Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026
The Google FDE interview mainly had two rounds. One round was basically an agentic system design round — just a casual chat with the interviewer about problems in agent system design. Questions included how to scale the agent, how to keep it safe, and what to do about agent infinite loops. The other round was SDE coding, and this is the one I really want to vent about. At first I felt pretty good…
- Conflicting Spreadsheet Instructions and a Stressful OnsiteGoogle · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Jul 2026Rejected
I interviewed for Applied AI. I don't know why a senior-level interview had only two coding rounds and one system-design round. Questions: Coding 1: Spreadsheet, implementing set_cell / get_cell. Coding 2: Google Shop System design: A customer-service system where users talk to a virtual agent and can escalate to a human. The recruiter's feedback was that, of the three rounds, Coding 1 and system…
- Google Business Analyst interview: technical screening and product communicationGoogle · Business Analyst · Technical Screen · Jul 2026Rejected
The interview loop felt fairly standard for Google, but I needed confidence at every stage. After speaking with a recruiter, I had a technical screen. The interviewer asked me to introduce myself, explain what I knew about the company and say why I wanted the role. We then moved to coding questions. The interviewer stayed relaxed as I worked. My impression was that they wanted me to keep steady a…
