Status: 11 YoE, Principal Engineer

This is just to give back to the community as I have enjoyed reading the interview experiences from others who have done the same.

Application Contacted via Linkedin

Preparation: 2 weeks. Mostly looking through medium and hard LC questions. Did some practice for some of the questions as they were interesting. I consider myself having strong base in atleast the basic algorithms and datastructures as I use them and also have prepared myself for past interviews (1.5 years before).

I don't like spending too much time on LC type questions TBH. I would rather learn something new or build something. I did this just because it is a Google interview and I really wanted to experience it regardless of the outcome.

I will not be posting the questions asked because of the NDA.

Rounds

1. Talk to recruitor - Recruitor called me to setup a date for interview. Walked me through the preparation stuff and all. Nice and helpful person. All interviews were scheduled back to back. You do have an option to reschedule it.
2. 1st coding round - A graph based question. Coded up the warm up question but was too slow for the second difficult question.
3. 2nd coding round - A matrix based question. Coded it and found some edge cases and probbaly missed 1 another edge case.
4. 3rd round googliness - It involved everything. Talking about past experience and challenges. Was given a system design question but not in too much detail. Team handling and what you would do in some situations etc. I enjoyed it.
5. 4th round coding - A query based question. Coded it but it was not the most optimum solution.
6. 5th round System Design - Networking related | filtering design. Went good, but I may have gone into too much detail at some point and did not communicate clearly or may have been too brief for some important points. Did not time well but it was a good time.

All in all, the feedback was:

1. Good understanding of algorithms and DS.
2. Slow coding. Because I had to think how the algorithm would work. This is probably because I did not practice a lot. Generally I like thinking while coding.
3. Not "perfect" code. Made some mistakes.
4. Good understanding of systems designing, but missed to communicate few important points well.

Leaning towards L4, so not going ahead with it.

From my point of view:

1. For senior position, you have to write almost perfect code and code it fast. You need to practice similar questions a lot or rote learn to do it faster. My preference as I have mentioned before is to not spend too much time for it.
2. Interviews were spread out to multiple days. It was very stressful for me. Should have helped if all rounds were scheduled 1 month apart ;)
3. All interviewers and recruiter were very nice.
4. Did not find the questions too hard to solve.
5. Google is probably not for me. I can probably re-interview after 6 or 12 months but I may not. I wish I could get to work at their scale as those problems interest me, but I will have to look somewhere else in future.

If Google is where you want to be, grind LC and also really understand your programming language well. Pace your system design question well.