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Google interview notes, page 2 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

Apr 2025
Went through the full Google TSE hiring pipeline for a Cloud/Network role, from referral application to a technical interview that ended in rejection. The process was smooth and well-communicated, but the actual interview blindsided me: I prepped for cloud, DevOps, and coding, and got 50 minutes of pure CCNA-level networking troubleshooting instead.
  • A customer can't SSH into a remote system. Walk me through how you'd troubleshoot it.
  • Two machines on the same VLAN can't communicate with each other. How do you approach this?
  • What is DNS and how would you explain it to someone unfamiliar with it?
  • Walk me through what happens during a TCP connection at the packet level.
  • How would you troubleshoot a DNS resolution failure?

“I threw out the usual suspects: firewall rules, routing issues, rebooting.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

May 2025
Interviewed at Google for a software engineering role in May. Behavioral went smoothly and the technical round felt solid too, but still got a generic rejection email with zero feedback after the weekend. No idea what actually sank it.
  • Walk through a coding problem, including edge cases, time complexity, and a follow-up extension.
  • Behavioral questions about past experiences and how you handled specific situations.

“Solved the main problem without any hints, covered edge cases, walked through examples, coded it up cleanly.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

May 2025
Went through the full Google Android Engineer loop, four rounds total, two phone screens and two onsites. Coding felt solid across the board but the behavioral round had me spiraling a bit. Still waiting to see how the hiring committee reads the overall picture.
  • Walk me through your past work experience and background.
  • Solve a data structures and algorithms problem in Java, explain your approach, and analyze time and space complexity.
  • Behavioral and situational questions assessing how you work with others and handle challenges at work.
  • Solve a coding problem efficiently, then tackle a follow-up problem within the same session.
  • Solve a problem independently, then justify why your solution is already optimal when asked about alternatives.

“This was just the opener before the actual coding problem.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Aug 2025
Went through the Google SWE pipeline over a few weeks: online assessment, two virtual technical rounds (one of which got rescheduled twice), and a googliness round. The technical round pushed into some tricky optimization territory and I couldn't finish the final implementation in time. Now sitting in a silence from the recruiter that's driving me a bit crazy.
  • Solve a medium-difficulty algorithmic problem using divide and conquer, then optimize the solution to reduce space complexity and convert the recursive approach to an iterative one.
  • Behavioral and culture-fit questions covering how you work, handle situations, and align with the company's values.

“Started fine.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Feb 2026
Passed the hiring committee loop for a Software Engineer role at Google in Warsaw after a previous failed attempt. The process included an online assessment with a grid pathfinding problem plus an HR screen, followed by an onsite with two sweeping line algorithm rounds. Prep was mostly Neetcode, Claude, and scraped Leetcode problems, with heavier focus on advanced algorithms the second time around.
  • Count the number of unique paths in a grid from one corner to the opposite corner, where you can move left, up, or down.
  • Two separate algorithm problems involving a sweeping line approach, asked during the onsite rounds.

“The non-standard move set tripped me up a bit.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Apr 2026
Behavioral round at Google for a software engineering role. Just one question but it had a lot of moving parts and I felt like I was rambling by the end.
  • Tell me about a time you genuinely listened to someone else (a teammate, customer, or stakeholder) and actually changed your approach based on what they said. Walk through the context, how you made sure you understood them, what you did differently, and what happened.

“I had a decent story ready about a disagreement with a PM over scoping, but I kept second-guessing whether it was specific enough.”

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Google·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Apr 2026
Behavioral round for an ML Engineer role at Google, four questions, all the classic stuff about failure and prioritization. Nothing technically deep but I still managed to fumble one of them.
  • Tell me about a time you went above and beyond what was expected of you.
  • Describe a time you failed. What happened and what did you take away from it?
  • Walk me through a time you had to manage several competing product requests at the same time.
  • How do you deal with product requirements changing partway through a project? Give a specific example.

“Picked a story I've told before and it came out fine.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026
Google system design round focused entirely on building a Timer class from scratch. More depth than I expected for what seemed like a simple API question.
  • Design and implement a Timer class that supports scheduling a single timer (overwriting any existing one) and scheduling multiple concurrent timers. Walk through the data structures, thread-safety concerns, and how the two scheduling modes interact.

“I went straight to a min-heap ordered by expiry time, which felt right, but then the interviewer started asking how setTimer interacts with already-running concurrent timers and I kind of fumbled.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
Google SWE interview with a queue-based algorithmic problem that sounds deceptively clean on the surface but gets tricky fast once you start thinking about minimizing operations. The core challenge was figuring out how to interleave polling across multiple queues efficiently rather than just draining them one at a time.
  • You have a collection of queues where you can only call isEmpty() or poll() (no peeking). Find the minimum number of elements across all queues and the minimum sum of elements across all queues, while minimizing the total number of isEmpty/poll calls. How do you interleave polling so you stop as early as possible and avoid unnecessary draining?

“This one took me a minute to even understand what the actual optimization target was.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Apr 2026
Google SWE coding round, one question the whole time. Pretty standard BFS territory but the multi-source angle is the part people trip on if they haven't seen it before.
  • Given an m x n grid with taxis at certain positions and empty cells elsewhere, return a matrix where each cell contains the shortest 4-directional distance to the nearest taxi.

“The key thing I almost missed was seeding all taxi positions into the queue at once before starting BFS.”

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