Google·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)
Apr 2026
Google SWE online assessment, 90 minutes, two coding problems. The first was a string processing task and the second was a feature rollout evaluator with dependency resolution. An AI assistant was apparently available but your code still had to pass the unit tests, which felt like a weird middle ground.
- Implement a function that processes an email string in fixed-size chunks, computes a checksum for each chunk using character weights, and uses that checksum to index into a verification string, returning the concatenation of all selected characters.
- Given a feature rollout system with user attributes and feature rules, implement an evaluator that checks country eligibility, platform version eligibility, and dependency satisfaction in the correct order, returning a structured decision with a reason string.
- Parse a dependency file where each line maps a feature name to a comma-separated list of dependencies, and correctly handle whitespace trimming and empty dependency lists.
- Handle cycle detection in a feature dependency graph where cycles can involve two features or longer chains, and format the cycle reason string to show the full path including the repeated node.
“The character weight mapping tripped me up a bit.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Google, Online Assessment (OA) round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.
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