Status: 2 year work exp
Position: SDE1 at Start up
Location: India
Date: Jan 2024

My Google India interview experience for L3 Software Engineering role.

Here’s my honest interview experience:

🗺️ The process:
1️⃣ Call from recruiter in around Nov 2023.
2️⃣ Team Fit Round .
3️⃣ Asked for 1 month of preparation time.
4️⃣ 4 coding rounds ( 1 telephonic , 3 Onsite ).
5️⃣ 1 Googliness round.

🎢 The interview breakdown:

1️⃣ Telephonic round 1:
Asked question from past experiences current role and projects working on.
Recruiter wanted to assess how closely my profile aligns with the available positions.

2️⃣ Coding round 2:
Two medium hard array and sliding window hash-map problems. Second was a follow up of the first had to use a linked list.

• Was asked question on internal working of hash-map.
• This round went well.

3️⃣ Coding round 3:
A modified version of Rate Limiting Problem ( design problem ).
Had to use 3 Hash-maps.

• Went well but missed on the part on handling infinite input streams/request on asynchronous calls of the APIs
• Deep Dive on testing of the APIs ( 15 minutes discussions )

4️⃣ Coding round 4:
A Hard Problem on array (Ad-hoc Type).

• Interviewer was only interested in O(N) solution .
• Came up with O(N^2) solution first and asked for hints which helped me to come up with O(NlogN) solution.
• After a long discussion finally able to give O(N) solution.
• Wrote pseudocode due to time constraints.

5️⃣ Coding round 5:
A sorting-based counting problem was asked to implement three APIs (insert,remove,getMin).
Medium difficulty.

• Optimized time complexity from O(logn) to O(1) using extra space for all APIs.
• Used Bucket sort and LRU cache to implement APIs.
• This was my best round.

6️⃣ Googliness and Leadership round:
Behavioral and leadership questions.

• Approach on handling an ML based project with no hard deadline.
• Changes possible in current culture of your organization.
• Handle Situation types questions .
• This round went well.

🎯 Result:
I was informed that my interview feedback is negative and apply again after one year. Which I'm still finding strange enough to believe in 😶 .
I came to know i was rejected because of round 3 and 4.