Hiring Position Details
Position: E5 SWE
Location: Menlo Park

Interview Process
Four 45-minute interviews conducted over BlueJeans, CoderPad, and Google Drawings. The following is not listed in any particular order (i.e not chronological).

Coding interview 1

1. Introduction (5 minutes)
2. Medium LC Problem (15 minutes)
   a. Provided optimal solution
3. Hard LC Problem Variant (25 minutes)
   a. Provided optimal solution

Coding interview 2

1. Introduction (5 minutes)
2. Hard LC Problem (35 minutes)
   a. Never seen it before, but later found on LC
   b. DP problem
   c. Provided a suboptimal solution
3. QA (5 minutes)

Product Architecture Design
No introductions, just went straight into the problem - large feature design within a service. Later scaled to every service/system. Barely used Google Drawings; mainly a lot of discussion and jotting down of notes into a single textbox on the Google drawing.

My advice - At every step, don't just mention one solution. Talk about simple approaches and any other approaches you can think of. Highlight the tradeoffs. Even apparently bad approaches have their benefits at times. Drive the conversation, but you also want to make sure you're diving into areas the interviewer cares about. It's a tough balance and I don't have a good answer for how to drive it while letting the interviewer guide where you should continue.

Behavioral
Pretty standard - conflict resolution, leadership, etc.

Result
Offer