Google interview notes, page 209 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 - Coding / Algorithms

Jul 2026

Google SWE onsite coding round, one question the whole session: design a restaurant waitlist with join, delete, and find_first_match. Sounds manageable until you start thinking about the complexity tradeoffs.

Design and implement a restaurant waitlist data structure that supports join(user), delete(user), and find_first_match(table_size), where find_first_match returns the earliest-joined user whose party size fits the given table without removing them.

“My first instinct was a plain array and i was halfway through coding it before realizing delete anywhere in the queue kills you.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Google SWE interview with a group expense splitting problem. The core task was computing minimal debt settlements, which sounds straightforward until you realize the 'minimal transactions' part is the whole puzzle.

Given a list of shared expenses where each expense has a payer, a total amount, and a list of people splitting it equally, compute the minimum number of money transfers needed to settle all debts among the group.

“I started by computing net balances per person, which was fine.”

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Google·Data Scientist·Onsite - Cross-functional / Panel

Jul 2026

A pretty intense cross-functional scenario interview for a Data Scientist role at Google, centered almost entirely on Trust and Safety conflict management. Four meaty questions, all tied to the same case. Left feeling like I'd either nailed it or completely talked in circles.

You're an analyst on a Trust team and a senior Growth PM (with VP backing) wants to loosen an upload filter to boost daily active users before a launch. Your analysis shows a 25-40% increase in exposure to violating content and regulatory risk. Walk through your full conflict management plan: stakeholder mapping, aligning on goals, writing a one-page decision memo, and how you'd keep things civil when the room gets heated.
How would you design a reversible experiment or phased rollout that balances growth needs against safety risk? Include your unit of randomization, guardrails, stop conditions, and on-call escalation plan. What single metric would you use as a hard kill-switch and what's its threshold?
If you believe a directive is unsafe, how do you formally document your dissent, get an independent safety review, and escalate without blowing up your working relationships? What changes if the deadline is 48 hours out?
Give a real example of a time you managed a conflict across team boundaries. Cover who the stakeholders were, what was at stake, what you actually did, the measurable outcome, and what you'd do differently.

“This one took me a while to get my footing on.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Google SWE coding round, one tree problem the whole time. Pretty standard vibe but the follow-up on complexity tripped me up a bit.

Given a binary tree, return the values of the nodes visible from the right side, top to bottom. Explain your algorithm and its time and space complexity, using either BFS or DFS.

“Went with BFS since level-order traversal makes it pretty natural to grab the last node at each depth.”

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Google·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Technical phone screen for a Data Scientist role at Google. One statistics question that felt deceptively simple but had a real gotcha buried in it.

Can bootstrap help reduce variance?

“I said yes immediately and started talking about how bootstrap gives you a variance estimate, which...”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Google SWE coding round, one question the whole time. They wanted a full design and implementation with complexity analysis, not just a working solution.

Design and implement a KthLargest class that takes an integer k and an initial list of integers, supports a constructor and an add(val) method that inserts a value and returns the current k-th largest element. Target O(log k) time per insertion and O(k) space. Explain your data structure choice, handle duplicates, and walk through the complexity.

“Min-heap of size k, pretty standard once you see it.”

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Google·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Google DS interview with a meaty product analytics case about a search metric drop. The question had about six layers to it and I kept feeling like I was one step behind the whole time.

Searching time per user per session dropped 35% over the past three months. A teammate wants to model T1 (time to first successful result) and T2 (time to giving up) as separate distributions. Critique that approach and design a rigorous analysis to find the root cause.

“This question is basically five questions stacked on top of each other.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Google SWE interview with a linked list addition problem. Pretty classic stuff but the O(1) space constraint is where things get interesting and where I nearly tripped up.

You're given two singly linked lists representing non-negative integers stored in reverse order, one digit per node. Add the two numbers and return the result as a new linked list, also in reverse order. Do it in O(n + m) time and O(1) extra space, not counting the output.

“The reverse storage is actually a gift because you can traverse both lists from head to tail and that already gives you the digits in addition order, least significant first.”

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Google·Data Scientist·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jul 2026

Behavioral screen for a Data Scientist role at Google, focused on soft skills and working across teams. Pretty standard culture fit stuff, but the persuasion question had some teeth to it.

Tell me about a time you had to convince non-technical colleagues to act on a recommendation you made.
Walk me through a difficult situation at work and how you handled it.

“I structured it as situation, action, result and it felt okay but I leaned too hard on the 'what I did' part and glossed over the actual impact.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Google SWE interview with a deceptively simple-looking array problem that made me second-guess myself more than it should have.

Given an array of two-digit integers, find the largest subset where every number shares at least one common digit (0-9). Return the size of that subset.

“My first instinct was to overcomplicate it.”

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