Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
Jun 2026
Google SWE coding round, one problem the whole time. It was a twist on the classic median-of-two-sorted-arrays problem but with run-length encoding thrown in, so you couldn't just decompress and brute force your way through it.
- Given two sorted arrays in run-length encoded form (each as a list of value-frequency pairs), find the median of the fully merged array without decompressing it. Target O(log(m+n)) time.
“I knew the base LC 4 problem well enough, but the RLE wrapping genuinely slowed me down.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Google, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.
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