← Back to Directory

Google interview notes, page 208 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 - Product Sense / Strategy

Jul 2026
Google PM interview with a two-part product question that sounds deceptively casual until you realize they want competitive analysis AND a full improvement pitch in one sitting. Decent experience, left feeling like I undersold the non-tech product pick.
  • Name three products you admire, at least one of which must be non-technology. For each, explain what you like about it and how it stacks up against its main competitors.
  • Pick one of the three products you mentioned and walk through how you'd improve it. Cover user pain points, how you'd measure success, and a prioritized roadmap.

“I'd prepped the tech picks fine but the non-tech requirement tripped me up a little.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Google SWE coding round, one algorithmic problem about grouping two-digit integers by shared digit. Pretty clean problem once you see the angle, but I fumbled the initial framing a bit.
  • You have an array of N integers, each between 10 and 99. A group is valid if there's at least one digit (0 through 9) that appears in every number in the group. Find the maximum size of a valid group you can form from the array.

“My first instinct was to overthink it and reach for some graph-based approach.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jul 2026
Behavioral round at Google for a software engineering role. Three questions, all pretty standard but they still managed to make me second-guess myself on each one.
  • Can you tell me about a time you supported a teammate who wasn't meeting expectations?
  • Walk me through the most difficult project you've worked on.
  • What's your proudest accomplishment outside of work?

“I had a decent story for this but I kept second-guessing whether to be too honest about how bad things actually got.”

View Post

Google·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Went through a technical screen for an ML Engineer role at Google that was basically a deep dive into how LLMs actually work, soup to nuts. One long question that branched into a dozen sub-topics. Felt like a PhD oral exam more than an interview.
  • Walk through the full lifecycle of a large language model, from data collection through deployment, covering pretraining, architecture choices, fine-tuning, and preference optimization. What are the key trade-offs across quality, safety, latency, cost, and scalability?

“This is the kind of question that sounds manageable until you're three minutes in and realize you've only covered data filtering and you have like eight more topics to go.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jul 2026
Google SWE coding round with a heap-based problem. Pretty standard algorithmic stuff but the details matter more than you'd think.
  • Given two sorted arrays and an integer k, find all index pairs (i, j) such that the sums arr1[i] + arr2[j] are among the k smallest possible sums.

“My first instinct was brute force all pairs and sort them, which works but blows up on large inputs.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jul 2026
Two coding problems at Google for a software engineer role. Both were algorithm-heavy and had a bunch of follow-ups that kept going deeper than I expected. Felt okay on the first one, less okay on the second.
  • Given a list of meeting time intervals, find the minimum number of rooms needed so all meetings can run simultaneously without conflict.
  • Design a component that maintains the top K items by score from a stream of (itemId, score) pairs, with tie-breaking by smaller itemId.

“I went straight for the min-heap approach because I'd seen something like it before.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jul 2026
Google onsite coding round for SWE, centered almost entirely on a single graph connectivity problem that kept escalating. The base case felt manageable but the follow-ups got genuinely hard fast.
  • Given a chronologically ordered log of friend events between N people, find the earliest timestamp at which all N people are connected (i.e. everyone is a transitive friend).
  • Now answer pairwise connectivity queries at arbitrary timestamps: given a time T and two people X and Y, were they connected at time T? The event log may include both friend and unfriend actions.
  • How would you handle fully dynamic connectivity, where unfriend events can happen at any time and queries arrive online (not in a batch)?

“This part I actually felt okay about.”

View Post

Google·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
Big ML system design question at Google for an MLE role. The whole interview was basically one giant open-ended problem about predicting a continuous target from chemical reaction data, and they expected you to go deep on every layer from EDA all the way to production monitoring. Felt more like a whiteboard dissertation than a typical interview.
  • You have a dataset of chemical reactions with molecule names and a real-valued reaction factor. Walk through your full end-to-end ML approach: from EDA and feature engineering to modeling, evaluation, and production deployment.
  • How would you split this chemical reaction dataset to properly evaluate generalization, and what are the tradeoffs between different splitting strategies?
  • How would you handle unseen molecules at inference time, and how does symmetry (A+B being equivalent to B+A) affect your modeling choices?
  • What modeling approaches would you consider for this task, from simple baselines up to deep learning, and how would you handle uncertainty estimation?
  • How would you design the production pipeline for this system, including monitoring, retraining triggers, and safety considerations given the scientific domain?

“This was the whole interview basically.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
Google SWE interview with a meaty system design question around log processing and session counting. One question, lots of surface area, and I definitely didn't cover everything they wanted.
  • You have a large log file where each line is a timestamp, user ID, and action. How would you compute the number of sessions per user, where a session ends when a user's consecutive events are more than T minutes apart? Cover input format assumptions, parsing, grouping by user, handling out-of-order records, memory constraints, time and space complexity, possible optimizations, and edge cases like empty users, single events, boundary conditions at exactly T, and malformed lines.

“This thing has so many layers I didn't know where to start.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Jul 2026
Two technical rounds for a Google SWE intern position, both felt pretty solid. First round was a tree problem, second was closer to hard difficulty but went smoothly. Waiting to hear back on team matching now.
  • Solve a tree-based coding problem, then walk through what steps you'd take before handing your code off to a manager.
  • Solve a harder algorithmic problem (near hard difficulty) and then describe how you would implement a follow-up extension to your solution.

“The tree part was fine, knocked it out in maybe 20 minutes.”

View Post