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Google interview notes, page 5 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 coding interview, one question on BST traversal logic. Pretty standard but I fumbled the edge cases more than I'd like to admit.
  • Given a binary search tree, find the floor and ceiling values for a given target number.

“I knew the general idea but kept second-guessing myself on the boundary conditions.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen

Apr 2026
Interviewed for a SWE role at Google, and it was pretty much what you'd expect: one of those standard screens where they want to hear about your background before anything else.
  • Walk me through your most recent position.

“Pretty standard opener but I still fumbled it a bit.”

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Google·Data Analyst·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
Google interview with a stats/probability question about sampling and false positives. Not much context on the role but felt like a data or analytics screen.
  • If you repeatedly sample 10,000 users, what would the distribution of false positives look like across those samples?

“Blanked for a second because I wasn't expecting a pure stats question this early.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
Google SWE interview with a coding round focused on NLP-adjacent ML fundamentals. The bigram question sounds deceptively simple until you get to the follow-up about scale, which is where things got interesting.
  • Build a bigram language model from a training corpus. For each word, track which words follow it and how frequently. Then implement a predict(word) function that returns the next word using weighted random sampling based on those frequencies.

“I got the basic structure down pretty fast, a dict of dicts mapping each word to its successors with counts.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Apr 2026
Google SWE coding round, one problem the whole session. It was a variant of a problem I thought I knew, which made it worse somehow.
  • Given a circular board with pieces labeled 'L' and 'R' separated by dots, determine whether a start configuration can be transformed into a target configuration. 'L' and 'R' pieces wrap around the ends of the board and still cannot cross each other.

“I knew LC 777 cold so I thought this was a gift.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen

Apr 2026
Interviewed for a sales rep role at Google and got hit with a product monetization question which felt a bit out of left field for the role.
  • How would you monetize WhatsApp?

“Not what I expected walking into a sales interview.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Apr 2026
Interviewed for a PM role at Google and got hit with a classic estimation question about Facebook likes. Not a lot to say about the process itself since it was just the one question, but it's the kind of thing that sounds breezy until you're actually in the room.
  • Estimate how many 'likes' occur on Facebook in a single day.

“I blanked for a second on where to even start.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Apr 2026
Google PM interview with a product design question set in a museum context. Pretty open-ended, which sounds fun until you're actually sitting there trying to figure out where to start.
  • Design a product for children at your favorite museum.

“I picked a natural history museum and kind of rambled before settling on a direction.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026
Solutions architect screen at Google centered on a single infrastructure scenario about a booking platform with traffic-driven downtime. Pretty focused, no fluff.
  • A booking platform sees heavy daytime traffic and needs server upgrades to handle it, but those upgrades cause 10 to 30 minutes of downtime. How would you redesign this to eliminate or minimize that downtime?

“My first instinct was blue-green deployments and I jumped to that pretty fast, maybe too fast.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Apr 2026
Google PM interview, one question about designing a product for airports. Pretty open-ended, which I wasn't fully prepared for.
  • Design a product for airports.

“Super broad and I kind of froze for a second trying to figure out where to even start.”

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