Status: New Grad, Not completed MSc in CS in an average European university, BSc in CS from the top tech university in Turkey, originally from Central Asia (just a fun fact)
Position: SWE at Google DeepMind
Location: London
Date of the offer: June 2020
Programming experience: Didn't do competitive programming, wrote my "hello world" in the university


Hi everyone,
Like many others, who have prepared here and received the offers, I'm very grateful for the community and the set of questions, which proved to be a good training material for all my interviews.
Joining DeepMind's Engineering team as an SWE (no ML experience was needed).

As a means of giving back, here's my interview experience.

I wanted to share some stats regarding all my applications to support one point - the referrals are, indeed, effective. At least, they worked in my case: 3 out of 4 offers I got were with referrals. The no-referral offer was an internship returnship offer.

Note: In the beginning, I wasn't recording my application process, so the actual number of the applied roles is 10-20 more than this.

Total application duration: 9-10 months (actively, 1.5 years passively during the MSc studies)
Applied positions [20 with referrals]: 84
No response [3 with referrals]: 11 (was referred to Apple, Square, Snapchat)
Pre-onsite interviews [5 with referrals]: 16 (phone, with a recruiter, hw)
Onsite interviews [4 with referrals]: 7 (Google, DeepMind, Facebook, Bloomberg, Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco)
Offers [3 with referrals]: 4 (BCDF)

Fun fact: Google's and DeepMind's application processes are separate and, for ex, my Google rejection didn't influence the DeepMind process.




DeepMind interview details


In my experience, the format and the questions were quite similar to Google's.
One exceptional follow-up question was somewhat related to the company's field of work (AI), e.g. in my solution to some matrix problem "why going row by row here is faster than going column by column?". My answer "because of the spatial locality" satisfied an interviewer.

* Sequential locality, a special case of spatial locality, occurs when data elements are arranged and accessed linearly, such as traversing the elements in a one-dimensional array. [Wiki]

0. Applied on their site, a referral followed up. [1st of March]

1. Recruiter phone screen (30-50 min): general CV-related questions, some behavioral questions [16th of March]

2. 2 Technical phone screens (1 hour each) [31st of March]:

• Short behavioral and easy technical questions (similar to Google's tech interviews' intro)
• 1-2 Algorithm questions
• Follow-ups

3. Virtual onsite (6 rounds) [11th and 13th of May]:

• 3 Technical interviews (similar to the phone screen)
• Behavioral interview with HR (values, culture and mission alignment, 30 min)
• Behavioral interview with PM (program manager, 30 min)
• Behavioral interview with TL (team lead, 45 min)

Result: Offer [12th of June]. Signed after some negotiations [3rd of July].

Finally, 5 resources which helped me the most in the preparation:

1. leetcode.com
2. interviewcake.com
3. docs.outtalent.com
4. interviews.school
5. blog.gainlo.co

Extra: used Candor's free guide to learn some negotiation tips, I managed to get a sign-on bonus, for ex.

I hope that this will be useful and wish everyone to land their dream offers :)