Google interview notes, page 27 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 2026

Google SWE interview with a tree problem that had more layers to it than I expected. The core question wasn't too bad but the follow-up about broken tree conditions is where things got interesting.

Given a trinary tree where the left child is less than the root, the middle child equals the root, and the right child is greater than the root, write a function to find the mode (most frequently occurring value). Also handle edge cases like an empty tree or a tree with no duplicates, and handle the case where the tree violates its own structural rules.

“The mode part clicked pretty fast.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026

System design round at Google for a software engineering role. One meaty question that took the full session, and I walked out unsure whether I'd covered enough of the right things.

Design a menu update and distribution system for a global restaurant chain, where menus are centrally managed but need to reach thousands of devices across many countries, support localization, handle offline scenarios, and correctly switch between breakfast/lunch/dinner windows.

“This one is bigger than it looks.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Google coding interview, one tree problem, nothing too fancy but it made me think harder than I expected.

Given two binary trees, write a function to determine whether they are identical.

“Went straight to recursion, which felt right.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Google SWE coding round with a pretty gnarly 2D geometry problem. Not your typical sliding window or hashmap question, this one had me second-guessing my whole approach for a while.

Design a class that accepts 2D points one at a time and, after each insertion, returns and removes a valid triplet of points where all pairwise Euclidean distances are below a given threshold. If no such triplet exists, return empty.

“I stared at this for a solid minute before saying anything.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Interviewed for a data engineer role at Google, the question was about employee hierarchy. Not much else to say, pretty thin on details.

Design or query a data structure representing an employee hierarchy.

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Google·Software Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen

Apr 2026

Interviewed for a Customer Success Manager role at Google and got hit with a product improvement question about Google Assistant. Pretty standard for the role but it still made me second-guess my prep.

How would you improve Google Assistant?

“I went straight into listing features and kind of skipped the part where you establish who the users are and what problems they actually have.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Google SWE interview that focused on a graph problem I thought I'd already solved, then immediately asked me to re-solve it a different way. The follow-up felt like a gut check on whether I actually understood the first solution or just memorized it.

Given the minimax path problem (find a path from the top-left to bottom-right of a grid that minimizes the maximum cell height along the path), can you solve it using DFS instead of Dijkstra? Walk through a binary search approach where you pick a threshold T and run DFS/BFS to check reachability, then analyze the time complexity versus the Dijkstra approach and discuss the trade-offs.

“I knew the Dijkstra version cold, so I figured this would be easy.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Apr 2026

Google PM interview with a mix of estimation questions and a product metrics deep-dive on Google Docs. Pretty standard format but the metrics question had more moving parts than I expected.

How many Starbucks locations are there in the United States?
Estimate how many smart TVs are sold globally each year.
What are the three most important metrics for Google Docs, and what measurable targets would you set for each?

“Went with a population-based breakdown, divided by density across urban vs suburban vs rural areas and estimated from there.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Google SWE interview focused on a word prediction data structure problem. Pretty design-heavy for a coding round, which I wasn't expecting.

Design a word predictor backed by a map of maps (word to a map of next-word counts). Implement a record(prev, next) method that increments the successor count, and a predict(prev) method that returns the most frequent next word. Then discuss time and space complexity, and how you'd extend this to n-grams.

“I got the basic structure down pretty quickly, a map where each key points to another map of candidates and their frequencies.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Apr 2026

Completed a Google onsite for an early-career SWE role and currently waiting on the hiring committee decision. Six rounds total covering behavioral, research/domain, and four coding sessions. Solved the base problem in every coding round but wobbled on extensions in three of the four, with one clearly strong round and solid non-technical signals throughout.

Behavioral and culture-fit questions assessing how you work, collaborate, and handle challenges.
Walk through your research papers and explain the design decisions you made.
Coding problem with a base case and a follow-up extension (Round 1).
Coding problem with a base case and a follow-up extension (Round 2).
Coding problem with a base case and a follow-up extension (Round 3).
Coding problem with a base case and a follow-up extension (Round 4).

“Went in expecting to just survive this round and ended up feeling weirdly good about it.”

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