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Google interview notes, page 83 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 - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
Google system design round for a software engineering role. The whole thing was one big design question about building a log processing pipeline end to end, and it went pretty deep across a lot of subsystems. Walked away feeling like I covered maybe 70% of what they wanted.
  • Design an end-to-end log processing system that ingests logs from many services and supports search and aggregation across the full pipeline.
  • How would you handle log parsing and structuring, and what are the tradeoffs between schema-on-read versus schema-on-write?
  • Walk through the query API layer: how do you support full-text search, time-range filters, and field-level aggregations, and how does a dashboard sit on top of that?
  • How do you ensure reliability in the pipeline, specifically around at-least-once versus exactly-once delivery, and how do you handle deduplication?
  • What are your cost and scale targets, and how does the architecture change as ingestion volume grows, say into the TB per day range?

“Big question, lots of moving parts.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Google SWE interview with a follow-up problem similar to Meeting Rooms III. Nothing too crazy, just needed to walk through an example and the interviewer seemed satisfied.
  • Given a set of meeting time intervals, find the minimum number of conference rooms required (similar to the Meeting Rooms III variant).

“Dry-running through an example was basically all they wanted.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Google coding screen, pretty short. One probabilistic simulation question and that was basically it.
  • Write a function that simulates flipping a fair coin 25 times and returns the total number of heads.

“Seems trivial but I second-guessed myself on whether to use a library random function or implement something from scratch.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

May 2026
Went through several DSA rounds at Google for a software engineer role and made it pretty far, but stumbled on the final coding round with a tricky recursive pattern problem. Also got some negative feedback on the behavioral side, so not holding my breath for good news.
  • Graph traversal problem combined with a heap-based approach.
  • Line sweep algorithm problem.
  • A recursive tree/segment decomposition problem requiring you to identify and implement a non-obvious recursive structure under time pressure. (Codeforces 448C style)

“Went fine.”

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Google·Technical Program Manager·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Interviewed for a TPM role at Google and got hit with a metrics question pretty early on. Short round, not much else to report.
  • How do you define success metrics for a program or initiative?

“I fumbled around with output vs outcome metrics for a bit and then tried to anchor it to business goals.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Google SWE coding round, one graph problem, pretty straightforward if you've done any shortest path stuff before. Felt decent about my solution but the whole thing was over faster than I expected.
  • You have a directed weighted graph of n nodes and a list of edges where each edge (u, v, w) means a signal takes w time to travel from u to v. Starting from source node k, what is the minimum time for the signal to reach every node? Return -1 if any node is unreachable.

“Classic Dijkstra setup.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026
Google PM interview with a single product design question. Pretty open-ended, which sounds fun until you're actually sitting there trying to figure out what 'kids' even means as a user segment.
  • How would you design Google Maps specifically for kids?

“My first instinct was to just list features and I had to stop myself because that's a trap...”

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Google·Software Engineer·Recruiter / HR Screen

May 2026
Short Google PMM screen, basically just one question about motivation for the role.
  • Why do you want to move into product marketing?

“Not much to say here.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Google SWE coding round, one problem, felt like a deceptively simple board game puzzle that turned into a real headache once I started thinking about edge cases.
  • You have a 1D board (string of up to 100 characters) with empty cells, coins, and one or more tokens. Each move, pick any token and slide it exactly 3 cells to the right. Tokens can't share a cell. A token only collects a coin if it lands on that cell (not cells it jumps over). What's the maximum number of coins you can collect?

“My first instinct was greedy, just move each token toward the nearest coin.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026
Google PM interview, got a classic product design question about a physical object. Pretty short session from what I can tell, just the one question but it opens up in a lot of directions if you let it.
  • How would you improve a water bottle?

“Looks easy and that's kind of the problem.”

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