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Google interview notes, page 30 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 coding round with a string serialization problem. Nothing flashy but the edge cases will trip you up if you're not careful.
  • Implement serialize and deserialize functions for a list of strings, where strings can contain any characters including numbers and special symbols.

“The tricky part is that strings can have literally any character, so you can't just pick a delimiter and call it a day.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Apr 2026
Google SWE coding round, one question the whole time: implement a Trie with wildcard search. Felt manageable until I started second-guessing my recursion logic mid-interview.
  • Implement a Trie (prefix tree) that supports adding words and searching for words where '.' can match any single character.

“The basic Trie structure came to me pretty fast.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Apr 2026
Behavioral round at Google for a bizops role. Just the one question from what I remember, pretty standard trust-building prompt.
  • Tell me about a time you built trust with someone at work.

“I had a story ready but it felt thin once I started telling it.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Apr 2026
Interviewed for an EM role at Google, behavioral round focused on leadership. Just the one question shared here but it was a meaty one.
  • How do you motivate your team to perform better?

“I rambled a bit on this one.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Apr 2026
Google SWE coding round focused on a top-K frequency problem using log/stream data. The interviewer pushed pretty hard on knowing all three approaches and had real follow-ups about scale, so it wasn't just 'write the code and leave'.
  • Given a log or chat stream where each line associates a key (user ID, IP, or word) with an event, return the K keys with the highest occurrence counts.
  • How would you handle the top-K frequency problem if the log file is too large to fit in memory?
  • How would you scale the top-K frequency solution across a distributed system with multiple machines?

“I knew this problem family but fumbled when they asked me to walk through all three approaches back to back.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026
Google PM interview with a single estimation question about Google Maps bandwidth. Pretty technical for a product role but not shocking given the company.
  • Estimate the bandwidth requirements for Google Maps.

“I started by breaking down the user types: someone loading a map tile vs.”

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Google·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
SQL-heavy technical screen for a Data Scientist role at Google, focused entirely on Trust & Safety query design. Four problems, all written SQL, all around a flags-and-reviews schema. No behavioral stuff, just grinding through joins and edge cases.
  • Given a schema with users, videos, and flags, write a SQL query that returns each video's count of distinct users who flagged it (counting a user only once per video regardless of how many times they flagged it), plus the total flag row count. Order by distinct flaggers descending, then total flags, then video ID.
  • Find the video(s) with the highest total number of flags, and for those videos return the total flag count alongside a count of flags that have actually been reviewed (i.e., have a non-NULL reviewed_outcome). Handle ties.
  • Which user flagged the most distinct videos that ended up getting an APPROVED review outcome? Count each user-video pair once even if the user flagged that video multiple times. Return all tied users if there's a tie.
  • Write two separate queries: one that returns all rows from the Reviews table where any column contains a NULL, and one that returns all rows from the Flags table where any non-primary-key column (user_id, video_id, or flagged_at) is NULL.

“This one looks easy and then you realize you need two different counts in the same SELECT.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Apr 2026
Google PM interview, product design question focused on a notification recommendation system for a news app. Pretty open-ended and they wanted you to go deep on all of it: the product, the tech stack, the decision logic, and how you'd validate it. A lot of ground to cover in one question.
  • You're the PM leading notification recommendations for an existing news app. Walk through how the product works, the underlying tech, how the system decides which notifications to send, and how you'd test it.

“This is basically four questions in one and I didn't realize that until I was already three minutes into just describing the product.”

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Google·Product Manager·Recruiter / HR Screen

Apr 2026
Interviewed for a PM role at Google, and it was pretty much what you'd expect for an opening round screen.
  • Walk me through your background and what you've been working on.

“Classic opener.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026
Got a system design question at Google that had nothing to do with anything I'd prepped for. Space networking is not something I'd ever thought about seriously before someone put it in front of me as an interview problem.
  • How would you design a high-speed network to enable communication between Earth-based teams and team members on the Moon?

“I stared at this for a second longer than I should have.”

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