← Back to Directory

Google interview notes, page 212 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 - Multi Round

Jul 2026
Two onsite coding rounds at Google for a mid-level engineering role. First round was shaky but recovered with hints, second felt much cleaner with a heap problem and a follow-up. Still waiting on HC feedback over a week later and the silence is killing me.
  • Given a matrix with multiple path queries and additional constraints, find valid paths using depth-first search with backtracking.
  • Solve a heap-based problem involving prioritization with additional constraints beyond the standard formulation, then optimize your solution and handle a follow-up variant.

“I got the approach right, DFS with backtracking, and the interviewer was on board.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Jul 2026
Two coding rounds at Google for a Software Engineer role. First round went pretty clean, second one got messy toward the end with a debugging spiral that ate up the clock. Still not sure if that was enough to skip a third round.
  • Solve a coding problem, explain your approach, and analyze the time and space complexity of your solution.
  • Given a dataset, design and implement an algorithm to process it correctly and produce the expected output.

“Finished this one with time to spare and walked through the complexity analysis.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Jul 2026
Two rounds of coding interviews at Google, both felt pretty solid but with some rough edges. The format was apparently new for at least one of the interviewers, which made things a little weird. Lots of tradeoffs discussion in the second round, more than I expected.
  • Solve a coding problem using an appropriate data structure, then optimize it beyond the initial correct solution.
  • Design or optimize a solution involving multiple tradeoffs, including analysis of a function's time complexity.

“Recognized it fast and coded it up right away.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
System design round at Google for a senior engineering role. One question, big scope: design a web crawler at Google scale. The kind of problem where you can talk for an hour and still feel like you barely scratched the surface.
  • Design a distributed web crawler that continuously discovers, fetches, and indexes billions of web pages while respecting per-domain rate limits and avoiding duplicate work.

“I started with the URL frontier and felt okay about that part.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Two rounds for a Google SWE internship, one went well and one got messy toward the end. The second round had a rule interpretation mixup during the dry run that I'm still not sure I can recover from.
  • Given an algorithmic problem, find the optimal solution and explain its time and space complexity.
  • What is the time complexity of a brute-force approach to the problem you just solved?
  • How would you extend the original problem to handle a more general or harder variant? Walk through edge cases without coding.
  • Solve a coding problem in linear time, given that an initial approach has a flaw.
  • Generalize your solution to handle a broader version of the problem, and describe the algorithm and its complexity.

“First round, went fine.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Aug 2026
Took an online DSA assessment for a software engineering role at Google. Two problems, got through the first one fully and only partly cracked the second. Now sitting here wondering if that's enough to move forward.
  • What are your chances of advancing to onsite rounds after fully solving one DSA problem and partially solving the second on an online assessment?

“Genuinely unsure.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Aug 2026
Cleared two technical rounds at Google for a Software Engineer role after cramming DSA patterns in a week, and now heading into a 45-minute behavioral round focused on leadership and cultural fit. The technical questions were a mix of hard greedy/string problems and medium-level sliding window and binary search problems.
  • Solve a problem involving greedy algorithms, string manipulation, and hashmaps under tight space constraints.
  • Given a stream or window of data, solve an optimization problem using a sliding window combined with a priority queue.
  • Solve a problem where the answer lies within a range and can be found by applying binary search on the answer space rather than on an array.
  • Discuss examples of leadership and how you demonstrate qualities that align with the company's values and culture.

“This was the hard one and it showed.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Aug 2026
Two rounds for a Google SWE intern role, both on the same day. First interviewer was painfully quiet and gave basically no signal the whole time. Second was friendlier but showed up 20 minutes late. Still waiting to hear back and genuinely can't tell how it went.
  • Walk me through a project on your resume.
  • A coding problem where the optimal solution involves a trie data structure.
  • An array and hashmap problem requiring careful reading of the problem constraints.

“Kept it short and moved on.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Aug 2026
Went through Google's hiring process for a software engineering role, four rounds total: one behavioral/culture fit and three coding. Felt pretty solid coming out of the coding sessions but got rejected anyway, which is still messing with my head.
  • Given a grid with blocked nodes, find the shortest path from a source to a destination without passing through any blocked nodes.
  • Follow-up: find the path from source to destination that passes through the fewest blocked nodes, and return that minimum count.

“Went with BFS, which felt like the right call.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Aug 2026
Did my Google SWE intern loop recently, two coding rounds back to back. Spent a lot of time upfront clarifying and talking through my approach before touching the keyboard, got through most of both problems but ran into some minor snags near the end and used basically all the time on each one. Left wondering if "mostly good" is enough to pass or if you need clean runs on both.
  • Given a coding problem, walk through your approach before implementing and then code a working solution within the interview time.

“Spent a chunk of time clarifying edge cases and talking through the general approach before writing anything.”

View Post