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Google interview notes, page 156 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·Product Manager·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Google PM behavioral round. Just one question but it took up most of the time, which I wasn't expecting.
  • Tell me about a failure and how you dealt with it.

“I had a story prepped but the follow-up questions kind of unraveled it.”

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Google·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Jun 2026
Two-part Google MLE interview, both in Google Docs. First part was a deep-dive on one of your ML projects, second part was live coding a Transformer forward pass from scratch. Felt manageable but the coding section had a lot of moving pieces.
  • Walk us through one of your ML projects in depth: what motivated it, how you handled the data, what modeling decisions you made, what the results were, and what you'd do differently now.
  • Implement a Transformer-style forward pass covering input embeddings, positional encoding, attention blocks with Q/K/V projections and scaled dot-product attention, a feed-forward block with residual connections and layer norm, and a final output projection.

“This sounds open-ended but they drill hard once you pick your project.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Google SWE coding round, one design question about a Bookshelf class. Pretty standard OOP stuff but they wanted test cases too, which I half-expected and half-forgot to prep for properly.
  • Design a Bookshelf class that supports adding a book, removing a book by title, and moving a book to a specific position. Book titles are unique. Write at least three test cases after your implementation.

“The core implementation wasn't bad.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jun 2026
Google SWE coding round, one problem the whole time: design a data structure supporting insert and k-th largest retrieval with duplicates. Felt like a clean problem on the surface but the efficiency requirement is where they really wanted to dig in.
  • Design a data structure that supports insert(num) and findLargest(k), where findLargest returns the k-th largest element (0-indexed, duplicates allowed). Optimize findLargest as much as possible.

“My first instinct was just a sorted list with bisect.insort, which gets you O(log n) insert but O(1) findLargest since you can index directly.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Google SWE coding round, one question but it had enough depth to keep me busy for a while. Basically a follow-up to the classic subsets problem, except with duplicates in the input which changes everything about how you approach it.
  • Given an integer array that may contain duplicate elements, return all possible subsets with no duplicate subsets in the result.

“My first instinct was to just slap a set on the output from the plain subsets solution and call it done.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
Google data engineer interview with a system design prompt about building a high-tech gym. One question, open-ended, and the kind of thing that sounds breezy until you're actually sitting there trying to figure out what 'high-tech' even means in this context.
  • How would you design a high-tech gym? Walk through the systems and data infrastructure you'd build.

“Spent the first two minutes just trying to scope it.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026
Got a product sense question for what seemed like a PM role at Google. Just the one question but it was a meaty one, the kind where you can go in a dozen directions and still feel like you missed something.
  • It's 2025 and you have unlimited resources. How would you improve Google Translate?

“I went straight to multimodal stuff, real-time voice with better prosody, image translation that actually understands context not just words on a sign.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
System design round at Google for a software engineering role. The whole thing centered on one big question about notification delivery guarantees, and it went deeper than I expected pretty fast.
  • Design a notification system that guarantees at-least-once delivery. Cover producer and consumer interfaces, deduplication keys, retry with exponential backoff, out-of-order message handling, and idempotency on the user-facing side.

“I started with the queue and producer interface which felt natural, but then they kept pulling the thread.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jun 2026
Google SWE interview, coding round. A follow-up to an earlier trie problem but with the trie explicitly off the table, which was a fun twist I did not fully see coming.
  • Given the same prefix/string matching problem from a prior round, solve it without using a trie. How would you approach it using sorting and binary search instead?

“I leaned on lower_bound and upper_bound after sorting the dictionary lexicographically.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Behavioral round at Google for a SWE role. Just one question but it required a pretty detailed story and I wasn't sure if mine landed.
  • Describe a situation where your proposed approach was chosen over competing alternatives and then actually put into practice.

“I had a decent story ready but the 'successfully implemented' part tripped me up a bit.”

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