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Google interview notes, page 167 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·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
Google system design screen for a software engineer role, focused entirely on AI inference cost vs latency trade-offs. Pretty meaty single question that branched into a bunch of sub-topics before I even felt like I'd finished my first answer.
  • You're building an AI product where each request can be routed to either a high-cost low-latency inference option or a low-cost high-latency one. How do you decide which to use, and how do you think about the trade-offs across user experience, quality, reliability, and cost? What metrics would you track, how would you segment workloads, and would you build a dynamic routing layer or just pick one globally?

“This question kept expanding on me.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Google SWE interview with a tree-based problem that looked like a clean recursion exercise until the follow-up hit. The efficiency angle is where it got real.
  • You're given a boolean expression tree where leaves hold true/false values and internal nodes are logical operators (AND, OR, XOR, NOT). A sequence of leaf flips is applied one at a time, each toggling a leaf's value. After every flip, return the new root value. The catch: nodes don't store parent pointers, so you have to figure out the path yourself, and you should avoid recomputing the whole tree on each flip.

“The base problem wasn't bad.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Google coding interview with a BST problem that looks clean on the surface but has a few edge cases that'll trip you up if you're not careful.
  • Given a BST and a key, find the largest key in the tree that is strictly smaller than the given key.

“My first instinct was to do an inorder traversal and scan through, which works but they clearly wanted something that uses the BST structure.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Behavioral round at Google for a software engineering role, just the one question but they really sat with it for a while.
  • Tell me about a time you had to work with someone who was genuinely difficult, whether that was someone dismissive, aggressive in code reviews, or just totally opposed to how you think. How did you actually get things done with them?

“This question is deceptively hard to answer well because you have to walk a line between being candid and not just venting about a coworker for five minutes.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Google SWE interview with a graph/tree problem that had a color-uniformity twist. The structural part was familiar enough but the follow-up added a layer I hadn't really prepped for.
  • Given an undirected graph where each node has a color (black or white), determine whether the graph can be interpreted as a valid binary tree rooted at some node such that every level of the tree contains only nodes of the same color.

“The base problem (is this undirected graph a valid binary tree) I'd seen before, so I got through the structural check okay.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026
Google product interview, one open-ended design prompt and not much else to go on. The vagueness of it was the whole challenge.
  • Identify a relevant problem space today and design a solution for it.

“This is the kind of prompt that sounds freeing until you're sitting there with no constraints and no idea where to start.”

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Google·Technical Program Manager·Hiring Manager Screen

Jun 2026
Interviewed for a TPM role at Google, one question about how you'd ramp up on an unfamiliar technology. Short and focused, nothing crazy.
  • If you joined a new program and needed to get up to speed on an unfamiliar technology, how would you approach that?

“I rambled a bit about reading docs and talking to engineers, which felt thin as soon as I said it.”

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Google·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Behavioral round for an MLE role at Google. About 45 minutes, pretty standard stuff around conflict and difficult situations. The interviewer was pleasant, nothing too surprising.
  • Tell me about a time you dealt with a difficult person or a tough interpersonal situation at work.
  • Describe a time you had a disagreement or debate with someone and how you handled it.

“Pretty expected for this type of round.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Google software engineer interview, one round, behavioral flavor. Nothing too wild, just the usual 'tell me about a hard project' type stuff.
  • What was the most challenging project you've worked on?

“Pretty standard.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Google SWE behavioral round, one question deep into stakeholder conflict territory. Pretty standard setup but the scope they expected in the answer was broader than I anticipated.
  • Tell me about a time you had to balance competing requirements from multiple customers or stakeholders. Walk through how you understood each side, made a prioritization call, communicated the outcome, and measured whether it worked.

“I had a decent story ready but I underestimated how much they wanted the quantified outcome part.”

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