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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
- Hacker Rank OA With an AI-Assisted Coding QuestionGoogle · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Apr 2026In progress
As the title says, I applied around the end of February this year. Last Tuesday I did the hiring assessment, and right after that the OA got sent out. It's a Hacker Rank test, and it feels pretty different from the CodeSignal OA that the earlier new-grad wave got, so I wanted to write it up and share. There are two questions total, and they explicitly said some questions let you use an AI tool, w…
- New "Most Like Me / Least Like Me" FormatGoogle · Online Assessment · Apr 2026
There's a change — a new question type: "Most like me / Least like me"!!! I'd read another poster's thread on this before and replied there too. (Putting everything together here so people don't miss it!) I just finished the newest GHA as of 5/xx/2026. Part one is the "Most like me" and "Least like me" questions — each one gives you three statements, and they're all positive things, so it's reall…
- Periodic Table Word Puzzle Phone Screen, Two Onsite DSA RoundsGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026
Phone Interview Given all the element symbols from the periodic table and a target word, return the total number of possible ways to compose that word using the element symbols. For example, "Physics" can be composed in the following ways: P - H - Y - Si - C - S P - H - Y - Si - Cs P - H - Y - S - I - C - S P - H - Y - S - I - Cs Onsite Round 1 (DSA) Given n players (numbered 0 to n - 1) and a se…
- Two Onsite Rounds, a Cross-Country Flight, and a Wait for Team MatchGoogle · Software Engineer · New Grad · Onsite · Apr 2026In progress
My R1 report is here. On Friday I finally did the R1 BQ that had gotten postponed earlier, and then HR reached out on Monday to schedule R2. I flew in from the Midwest to Mountain View, and after finishing R2, flew straight back — I was exhausted. Interview 1 Given an array representing a gold chain, where each number is the weight of one link. You need to remove one link, reconnect the chain, an…
- Water-Flow Paths and Good Numbers at OnsiteGoogle · Software Engineer · New Grad · Onsite · Apr 2026
Software Engineer II, Early Career - United States 03/31: Applied 04/01: OA 05/14: Virtual interview R1 — behavioral questions + coding (I don't remember the question) 06/08: Got an email about next steps and scheduled a recruiter meeting 06/15: Talked with the recruiter, got the onsite details 07/14: Onsite interview R2 — coding + coding The R2 onsite questions were: Question 1: Longest Water-Fl…
- All-English First Round, No Behavioral QuestionsGoogle · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Mar 2026No response
I'm based in the US, so they set me up with an interviewer for this one, all in English. No behavioral questions, no self-introduction, straight into problems. Given a string input, return true if every subsequence of length ≥ 3 is a valid English word. I used a recursive approach and walked through the time and space complexity. Given a string input, return true if every subsequence of length ≥…
- BQ, ML Domain, and a Mahjong-Winning-Hand Coding QuestionGoogle · Software Engineer · New Grad · Onsite · Mar 2026In progress
Timeline: 2025/12/23: HR reached out and asked me to send my latest transcript. 2026/01/05: Another HR emailed to set up a brief chat. 2026/01/14: HR chat — mainly asked about my research area and explained the interview format. They said it's basically one BQ round plus three coding rounds, or one BQ round plus one ML domain round plus two coding rounds, split into two big loops. I chose one BQ…
- L3 Offer on the First Attempt, DSA Rounds OnlyGoogle · Software Engineer · Other · Mar 2026Offer
Right now I lead tech at a small maritime startup. Google gave me an L3 offer, toward the upper end of the band, and it was my first and only try. Real system design was always my weakest area, even though I've always been decent at generalizing from specifics. Studying it properly left me calm and self-assured when the conversation turned to: how to scale reads or writes, and what each approach…
- Timeline From OA to Team MatchingGoogle · Software Engineer · New Grad · Onsite · Mar 2026In progress
Sharing a timeline and prep experience, hoping team matching goes well for me. Timeline 9/30 - role opened, submitted with a referral that same day 11/16 - received the OA, finished it 11/19, 11/26 next step: submit transcript 1/6 - R1 coding + BQ 1/8 - notified R1 passed, submit transcript + updated resume 1/15 - visa call (asked about status, whether I'd applied for EAD before, etc.) 2/4 - Bay…
- Two Coding Rounds, Two System Designs and a Month Waiting for Team MatchGoogle · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Mar 2026Offer
Interview Process: A friend referred me in October, and in the middle of November a Google recruiter phoned me. That first call is what started the whole thing. Two virtual rounds came next, a Googliness interview with a hiring manager and my first system design round, both held in the second week of December. Once I passed them, the onsite was set for the first week of January. Google is back to…
- A Next-Word Predictor Coding Round Plus BQGoogle · Data Scientist · HR Screen · Feb 2026
This round's interview question: given some training sentences, write two functions — a training function and a predictor function. The predictor function should take a word as input and output what the first word after that word could be. Example: ["I", "am", "Sam"] ["Sam", "I", "am"] ["I", "like", "green", "eggs", "and", "ham"] My approach: in the training function, use a dictionary to count ho…
- Passed General Hiring, Failed the C++ Onsite RoundGoogle · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Feb 2026In progress
Timeline: HR reached out around 1/20, interviews started around 2/10 — 4 rounds total: AI/ML technical knowledge, 2 rounds of coding, and 1 round of BQ. AI/ML Round The interviewer pulled AI/ML related content from my resume and dug into it. This round felt pretty new — the interviewer even said it was their first time doing an AI/ML round, so the pace was relatively friendly and I felt like they…
- Three Technical Rounds and GoogleynessGoogle · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Feb 2026
First round: Technical interview Question: Add and search for words in a Trie. Because I had limited preparation time, I mainly reviewed common topics such as graph theory and dynamic programming, but I did not cover Tries. The problem was roughly about adding and searching for words. A Trie supports fast word lookup because of its tree structure, and the return behavior needed attention. I told…
- A Friendly BQ Round That Kept Digging Into Conflict and OwnershipGoogle · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Jan 2026
The interviewer for this BQ round was very nice and friendly, and took notes the whole time. Overall it didn't feel like an interrogation, more like a logical conversation — they kept circling back around the same competency and probing deeper. Disagree / Conflict First asked: have you ever disagreed with someone. After I gave an example, they followed up asking how I generally deal with conflict…
- Inside the Hiring Assessment's Judgment SectionGoogle · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Jan 2026
The assessment has two parts. The first part is the same as what earlier posts already described, so I won't repeat it here. For the second part, since earlier posts only mentioned it briefly, let me say a bit more. This section gives you a scenario and asks you to pick the action you'd be most likely and least likely to take. Here's what I got: You had a good idea about YouTube's design that you…
- Initially Rejected, Reopened by an HR Mistake, Then a Two-Round Virtual OnsiteGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Dec 2025In progress
Applied after getting a referral on 2025.10.01. Rejected on 2025.10.14. 2025.10.19 — Got an apology email from HR saying the application was mistakenly closed, and they sent me an OA. 2025.10.21 — Completed the OA. 90 minutes, two questions, the same ones that were already known online — very easy. 2025.10.23 — Got the invite for the first two rounds, scheduled for 10.30. 2025.10.30 — Round 1 tec…
- My Best Behavioral Round YetGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Dec 2025
Last week's BQ (behavioral questions) interview report — I posted the coding round separately on the forum too. The BQ round was scheduled separately. It was originally supposed to be combined with another round, but got rescheduled at the last minute, so there ended up being a week's gap between them. They didn't ask about my resume. Self-introduction, then the first question came smoothly: what…
- My Strategy for Passing the Hiring Assessment Personality TestGoogle · Data Scientist · Online Assessment · Dec 2025
As the first stage of the interview process, this one's pretty simple — but it would be a shame to get filtered out here. I looked through everything I could find online and combined it with my own experience to put together what I think is the most complete summary out there, to save everyone some time. Just read through this whole post and you should sail through it. What's the Google Hiring As…
- OA, Two Virtual Rounds, Onsite in NYC, Rejected in JanuaryGoogle · Software Engineer · New Grad · Onsite · Dec 2025Rejected
This is a much-delayed writeup. I applied in early November 2025, got the OA two days later, and finished it that same night — they told me I passed right away and scheduled R1. A week later they gave me the specific R1 time. Coding and BQ were both on the same day. R1 tech was basically the exact LeetCode 295 (Find Median from Data Stream, two heaps). After I finished, we did a dry run plus comp…
- OA: Token-Hopping Coin Board and Shared-Digit GroupingGoogle · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Dec 2025
Two questions, 90 minutes, not hard. First question: given a string representing the board of a single-player game laid out horizontally, containing three possible values: '.', 'T', 'C'. '.' means the position is empty, 'C' means there's a coin at that position, and 'T' means the player's token is at that position. The board length is at most 100. The player has multiple tokens, and the movement…
- Rejected at the ML System Design RoundGoogle · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Dec 2025Rejected
Sharing my rejection story — I just failed my Google Machine Learning Engineer interview at the last stage, so I'm writing it down while it's fresh, for anyone coming after me to avoid the same pitfalls. Process 5 rounds total: Phone screen (coding) Onsite coding, two rounds ML system design, one round Behavior/leadership, one round Process Review Phone Screen A LeetCode medium, a variant combini…
- Two Back-to-Back Rounds, BQ Then DPGoogle · Software Engineer · New Grad · Onsite · Dec 2025
This year's Early Career interview process has two rounds, and each round includes two interviews, usually scheduled back to back on the same day. If you do well in the first round, you get invited to the second round. Round 1 This includes a BQ (behavioral) interview and a Tech interview. The BQ interviewer clearly had a list of questions and just went down it in order — I'd answer one and they'…
- A Behavioral Screen on Team Leadership, Answered via ScrumGoogle · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Nov 2025
Was it last month or the month before? The interviewer was young. The main questions were: Talk about one of your projects Some hypothetical questions around team playing and leadership — for example, if you were the team lead, how would you handle someone on the team blowing past a deadline, or how would you assign roles when the team runs into a new problem that nobody on the team is familiar w…
- Rejected Everywhere Else Before Landing an All-Strong-Hire DSR OfferGoogle · Data Scientist · Senior+ · Onsite · Nov 2025Offer
I've read some experience posts on the forum before, and this is my way of giving back — my first post, sharing some of my own experience here. Some background first: I'm at a big company, I've been coasting for several years, and I felt like I was wasting away, so I planned to switch jobs earlier this year. It didn't go well though — I got rejected at the hiring manager round, then coding/SQL ro…
- Right-Side View BFS, Then a Pure Behavioral RoundGoogle · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Nov 2025
R1: Technical interview. The interviewer was a senior frontend engineer. We did a bit of small talk up front, then went straight to the coding link. Q1: Given a binary tree, output all the nodes visible from the right side. I used BFS — each round, take all the nodes at the current level, output the last one, then push all the nodes of the next level into the queue. Q2: Given two arrays arr1 and…
- A Brutal CRR SQL Question with LAG and 4-5 CTEsGoogle · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Oct 2025Rejected
This isn't a super fresh write-up, but while I was prepping I noticed there weren't many Data Scientist interview experience posts here, so I'm sharing mine. First was the HR phone screen — we talked a bit about projects I'd worked on before and they asked about my SQL and Python experience. I passed and got scheduled for the first round. The first round had two sessions: they said it would be on…
- A Two-Part Invoice Matching Coding ScreenGoogle · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Oct 2025
We started with quick self-introductions on both sides — no deep-dive project questions. Then came two coding questions built around a single scenario; the questions and the amount of code involved weren't trivial. At the end I got to ask the interviewer some questions. Q1: Given the invoice ID inside a payment's memo, find the matching invoice in the invoice list and output the result. My approa…
- Cold-Called Into the DSR Track, All Strong HireGoogle · Data Scientist · Senior+ · Onsite · Oct 2025Offer
I'd read a small handful of interview reports, and even those helped a lot. A bit of background first: I'm at a big company, I've been coasting for a few years, and it started to feel like I was wasting my time, so at the start of this year I decided to look for a new job. It wasn't smooth — I got rejected by hiring managers, rejected on coding or SQL, rejected at onsite, rejected at the final ro…
- Four Technical Rounds, One Interviewer Showed Up Late and Never ApologizedGoogle · Data Scientist · Onsite · Oct 2025
Overall the interview questions were pretty hard, but the interviewers were mostly friendly and did a good job guiding you along (except for one round). Google's interviews feel hard to prepare for — unlike Meta, which has a ton of interview writeups floating around. I think it really comes down to what you've built up over time. Technical: Statistics Question 1: Assume we have a sample with 100…
- Second-Round Onsite, One Interviewer Cancels via Late-Night EmailGoogle · Data Scientist · Onsite · Oct 2025In progress
About a month or two ago I did my first round, which had two sessions, but I honestly don't remember what was covered. I guess I didn't do well, because there was no follow-up. Last week I suddenly heard that I'd be moving on to a second round. The second round was supposed to have three sessions, but the interviewer for one of them wasn't available and canceled on me by email in the middle of th…
