Recently interviewed with Google for an L4 role (4 YOE). Sharing my experience and would love to hear thoughts from people who’ve gone through similar rounds recently.

Online Rounds

Round 1 (DSA)
Given:

• Movies with ratings
• Similarity graph between movies

Task:
Return the top K movies similar to a given movie.

Follow-up:
Optimize the solution to achieve close to O(log K) time complexity and O(K) space complexity.

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Round 2 — Googliness / Behavioural
Mostly standard behavioural questions around collaboration, conflict resolution, ownership, etc.

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Onsite Rounds

Round 3 (Design + Coding)
Given APIs:

• insertAd(string content, int score)
• getAd()

Requirements:

• getAd() should always return the highest scored ad
• After returning an ad, decrease its score
• Consecutive same ads should not appear

Follow-up:
Introduce a cooldown/gap before the same ad can appear again while keeping operations close to O(1).

I was able to code the follow-up as well.

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Round 4 (Graphs/Grid)
Find all lakes in a grid given one land cell.

Initial version was straightforward (water surrounded by land), but interviewer added a twist:

• What if there is land inside the lake?

I explained the approach verbally, but due to time constraints interviewer didn’t ask me to code it.

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My verdicts according to me:

1st: SH
2nd: H/SH
3rd: SH
4th: H/LH

With 4 years of experience, what do you think are the chances for L4 at Google?

Would really appreciate insights from people who’ve recently gone through the process.

Final Verdict : Positive (Moving to team match)