Google interview notes, page 74 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 - Coding / Algorithms

May 2026

Google SWE coding round with a grid path problem that had a tricky one-step lookback constraint. Not your standard DFS on a grid, the extra state made it harder to think through cleanly under pressure.

Given an m x n integer grid, find the longest path starting from any cell where each move goes to an adjacent cell (4 directions) and the value is non-increasing, except that each step can also compare against the value two cells back (not just the immediately previous cell). Return the number of cells visited on the longest valid path.

“The base idea looks like a standard longest decreasing path on a grid, which I've seen before, so I jumped into memoized DFS pretty fast.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Google SWE interview with a string manipulation problem that looks straightforward until you actually try to get the parenthesization exactly right. One question, but it had enough depth to keep me busy for the whole session.

Given a string in reverse Polish notation (e.g. "2,1,+,3,*"), convert it to an equivalent infix expression with no unnecessary parentheses (e.g. "(2+1)*3").

“The stack-based conversion part I got pretty quickly.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

May 2026

Went through the full Google SWE loop and came out the other side with a mixed bag of results. The behavioral round nearly tanked everything until my recruiter stepped in and gave me a redo, which honestly saved the whole thing. Technical rounds went reasonably well but not perfectly, and now I'm sitting in team matching limbo wondering if an H/H/H/LH spread is enough for HMs to bite.

Given a list of tasks with start and end times, schedule them and return x/y coordinates for each scheduled task.
Design a multi-user heart rate monitor system, including class structures, object relationships, and appropriate data structures.
Solve a divide and conquer problem (specific domain not disclosed).
Behavioral round: walk through past experiences demonstrating leadership, problem-solving, and engineering judgment.

“This one went fine.”

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Google·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Google data scientist interview that went deep on model selection for a binary classification problem with limited data. The whole conversation revolved around logistic regression vs. tree-based ensembles, regularization, and overfitting. More theoretical than I expected for a DS role.

What is logistic regression and what loss function does it use?
Under what conditions might logistic regression outperform a random forest?
Explain L1 and L2 regularization and what each one does to the model.
How would you detect overfitting in logistic regression and what would you do about it?
Compare random forests and gradient boosting across bias, variance, interpretability, and when you'd pick one over the other.

“Covered log loss and the sigmoid output, felt okay about it.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Google SWE interview focused on a custom data structure problem that seemed straightforward at first but had enough layers to keep you busy for the whole session. The thread-safety follow-up is where things got real.

Design a data structure called FancySet that stores unique integers and supports add, delete, and getRandom operations, all in average O(1) time.
What should getRandom do when the set is empty, and how do you justify that behavior?
How would you make this data structure thread-safe? Compare a single global lock against finer-grained locking strategies and explain the trade-offs.

“The core insight is pairing a hash map with a dynamic array.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026

Google PM interview with a classic product design question about airport travelers. Pretty open-ended, which sounds fun until you're actually in it and realize how many directions you could go.

Design a product to help travelers at airports. How would you approach building it?

“I spent probably too long trying to pick the perfect user segment.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Google software engineering interview with a coding question focused on range lookup. Pretty clean problem but the efficiency angle is where they're really testing you.

Design a class that takes a list of non-overlapping integer ranges and supports efficient point queries. Given an integer x, the query method should return which range contains x, or null if none does.

“My first instinct was a linear scan and I almost said it out loud before catching myself.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Google SWE interview with an OO design and algorithm question around parsing activity logs to find timed-out events. Not the flashiest problem but there's more to it than the example makes it look.

Given a list of activity log records (each with an activity ID, timestamp, and event type like START or END) and a timeout threshold, design appropriate classes and implement a function that returns all activity IDs whose duration exceeds the timeout.

“Spent the first few minutes just on the class design, which I think was the right call but I overdid it a bit.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026

Behavioral round at Google for a software engineering role. Just one question but it had a lot of weight to it, the kind where you can tell they're really trying to figure out who you are, not just what you've done.

Tell me about a time you were part of a team or company with a toxic or dysfunctional culture. How did you stay effective, try to change things, and ultimately decide whether to stay or go?

“This one made me pause longer than I wanted to.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026

Prepped for a Google PM interview and got hit with a go-to-market strategy question. Pretty standard for product roles at this level but still took me a second to get my footing.

As a product manager preparing for launch, how would you approach a go-to-market strategy?

“I started with target audience segmentation and worked toward positioning, pricing, and channel selection.”

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