Google interview notes, page 109 of 215

FAANG / Big Tech

Most of these Google write-ups come from Software Engineers (1,167), then Product Managers (686) and Data Scientists (125). The most reported rounds are the product sense round (667), the technical phone screen (660), the behavioral / leadership round (252) and the onsite coding round (214).

2146 interview notes · updated Oct 2026

Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Google SWE interview with a text-wrapping problem that starts simple and then gets a follow-up that actually requires some real thinking. Nothing behavioral, just straight algorithms the whole time.

Given a fixed page width W (in characters) and a string of space-separated words, write a function that counts how many lines are needed to render the text using greedy word wrapping (no breaking words across lines).
Follow-up: if you have two paragraphs displayed side by side sharing a total width W, how do you find the column split (w1 and w2, where w1 + w2 = W) that minimizes the maximum number of lines across both columns?

“Seemed straightforward and I got through the greedy logic fine.”

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Google·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Two coding problems for a Google MLE round, both pretty meaty. The first was a weighted interval scheduling problem and the second was the classic robot room cleaning thing where you have to build your own coordinate system blind. Felt like a solid session but I definitely had shaky moments on both.

You have a list of meeting requests, each with a start time, end time, and a priority value. Only one meeting can use the room at a time. Write a function that selects a non-overlapping subset of meetings to maximize the total priority sum.
You control a robot vacuum in an unknown grid room. You can only call move(), turnLeft(), turnRight(), and clean() on it. Implement a function that guarantees every reachable empty cell gets cleaned, without any direct access to the room layout.

“I recognized this as weighted interval scheduling pretty quickly, which helped.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

May 2026

Google SWE interview that went deep into graph theory territory. The core problem was a follow-up on a classic connectivity question, but with deletions thrown in, which completely changes the data structure story. Pretty brutal if you only prepped Union-Find.

You have a log of friendship events that includes both additions and removals. After each event, you might be asked if two people are connected, or if the whole graph is still a single connected component. How do you handle this efficiently?

“This is the fully dynamic connectivity problem and the moment they said 'removals' I knew my Union-Find prep was not going to save me.”

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Google·Technical Program Manager·Hiring Manager Screen

May 2026

Screened for a TPM role at Google, basically just one question about my recent experience and that was the extent of it.

Walk me through your most recent role.

“Pretty standard opener but I still fumbled it a bit.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Got a coding question at Google for a software engineer role. Pretty straightforward array manipulation problem but I want to write it up in case it helps someone.

Given an integer array, construct a new array that contains each original element alongside its doubled value, then return the result in any shuffled order.

“Simpler than it sounds.”

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Google·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Google DS interview with a battery prediction scenario that felt more like a research problem than a typical ML question. The feature engineering follow-up pushed me into territory I wasn't fully prepared for.

Write code using linear interpolation to estimate remaining usage time from a phone's current battery percentage.
Beyond battery percentage, what additional features would you engineer to improve prediction accuracy, and why?
If no historical data exists for the specific phone model, how would you build a usable training set using data from other devices?

“Straightforward enough on the surface.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Google SWE interview with a graph theory problem that looked like a simple tree check but had more layers than I expected. One question, but it kept branching into follow-ups.

Given an undirected acyclic graph with n nodes and a list of edges, determine whether it forms a valid binary tree. If it does, return a node that can serve as the root.

“I jumped straight to checking edge count and connectivity, which was fine, but I forgot that not every node is a valid root.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

Google system design round for a software engineering role. One deep question that basically ate the whole session. Walked out unsure if I'd covered enough ground or just rambled for 45 minutes.

Design a distributed log storage system that supports append-only writes, configurable retention policies, partitioning, replication, high-throughput sequential reads, segment management, compaction, indexing, and leader/follower roles with recovery.

“This is basically 'design Kafka from scratch' and they know it.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026

PM strategy question for Google, focused on how the company could break into streaming by working with Hollywood. Single question, no fluff, just a big open-ended case.

How should Google partner with the movie industry to enter the streaming space?

“I went straight to the competitive landscape and probably spent too long there.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026

Interviewed at Google for a product role and got hit with a VR metrics question that I thought I was ready for but definitely fumbled the structure on.

How would you measure success for a new VR feature?

“I went straight to engagement metrics and kind of forgot to ask clarifying questions first, which I regret.”

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