I recently had the opportunity to interview for Google L5 role after previously failing to convert for L4 role a year earlier.

Screening Round - This was skipped for me because I had cleared coding rounds multiple times in the past.

Coding Rounds
There were three coding rounds in total wherein I had to pass ateleast 3

1. The first round had a question where I had to find who spoke the most words in chat. I solved it using heap, this was followed up with a few follow up questions out of which i couldn't solve one of them which led to No Hire rating for this round.
2. In the second coding round, I was given 2D array where I had to find the maximum length of consecutive integers as neighbours in the grid. Solved it with BFS and the result was Hire
3. In the third round, I was given an array of all the files and directories and the files and directories that were visited. I had to return all the files that were visited and if the all the files in a directory were visited, i had to return the directory only instead of the files. I solved it using Trie and the result was Hire

System Design Round
For the System Design Round, I was asked to design an Image Hosting website. I talked about the serivces, routing, storage, costs, high avialabiltiy, scalability. As a follow up, I was asked if they wanted to run some AI models on those images how would the diesgn change, talked about the changes. The result was Hire

Googliness Round
This was a behavioural round where I had to demonstrate leadership qualities. I used the STAR method to answer the questions asked. The result was Hire

Team Matching
After submitting my updated Resume, I matched with two teams and one of them straight away gave a go ahead for my candidature which I accepted.

Hiring Committee
After team matching, my candidature went to the hiring committee which recommended that the questions asked to me in the coding rounds were incorrect and my results of my successful coding rounds were deemed invalid. So they asked me to reapppear in the coding rounds and I need to score a Hire in both the rounds or I'll be rejected. Now I haven't practiced DSA since my coding rounds which were 4 months prior so I had to start again to come to the same level again.

Coding Round 4
I was asked a problem where a map with key being the voters, and value being the value of their votes, in order to win an election, a candidate must secure more than 50% of the vote values. I had to return the number of voters combinations in order to win the election. I created a super set of all the voters and then calculated the voting value of each set and if it was more than half of total voting value incremented the counter. The result was No Hire

Coding Round 5
I am yet to give this round though seems like this round is of no consequence as I needed two Hires to convert.

The whole process took more than 4 months