Sharing my Google L3 SWE interview journey for the Bangalore location. Reading experiences on LeetCode helped me a lot during the process, so hopefully this helps someone else.
Background: B.Tech IIT (1.7 YOE)
Timeline
October
- A recruiter reached out regarding an L3 Software Engineer opportunity.
November
- Round 1 (Virtual Coding)- 2 questions: Backtracking(easy-medium) and Prefix Sum(medium-hard),
- Round 2 (Virtual Googliness)- Standard Behavioral
Fortunately, I cleared both rounds and was invited for onsite interviews.
January
I traveled to Bangalore for two in-person coding interviews.
- Round 3 (Coding)- Graph(easy-medium) and Monotonic stack + Line sweep(medium-hard)
- Round 4 (Coding)- 2D DP(Hard)
Team Matching + Hiring Committee
Got feedback of onsite after a week and my packet was sent for TM. TM was scheduled within a week and after a successful TM round my packet was then sent to Hiring Committee review.
Offer
Following HC approval, I had a compensation discussion and finally received and accepted the offer in Feb.
Overall Thoughts
- The process was long and required a lot of patience.
- There were multiple periods of silence and some rescheduling along the way, so it's important not to overanalyze timelines or compare them with others.
- Communication, clean coding, and discussing trade-offs clearly were just as important as arriving at the optimal solution.
- Team matching and Hiring Committee can take time, and every candidate's timeline is different.
Grateful for everyone who shared their experiences here, it helped me tremendously throughout the process.
P.S.- Please don't ask for exact questions. I couldn't find any of my exact interview questions, and most of them were wrapped in a story/context. If you've built a strong understanding of the underlying topics and patterns, you'll be well prepared to tackle them. All the best!
