Google SWE Intern Interview Experience (Round 1) – Tree DP + AI Fluency

Had my Round 1 interview for the Google SWE Intern position today, so I thought I'd share my experience in case it helps others preparing.

The interview lasted around 1 hour and consisted of one coding problem with a follow-up, followed by a few AI fluency questions.

Question 1

You are given a weighted binary tree, where each edge has a positive integer weight. Your task is to remove a set of edges such that every leaf node becomes disconnected from the root. Removing an edge incurs a cost equal to its weight. Find the minimum total cost required to disconnect all leaf nodes from the root.

I proposed a postorder traversal solution where each subtree computes the minimum cost required to disconnect all leaves in that subtree. The interviewer was happy with the approach, and we discussed the recurrence and complexity.

Follow-up

The interviewer then generalized the problem:

How would you solve the same problem if the tree were an N-ary tree instead of a binary tree?

The core idea remained the same, but instead of handling two children, the solution had to work for an arbitrary number of children. I reached the final approach with a couple of hints from the interviewer.

AI Fluency

The last few minutes were dedicated to AI-related questions (around 3–4 of them). The interviewer asked me questions like how do I use AI in my regular workflow and do I give the AI complete ownership of my project, how I manage to use AI for tasks like debugging and stuff like this.

Overall Experience

The interviewer was friendly and collaborative throughout the interview. They encouraged discussion instead of expecting the final solution immediately, and the hints they provided during the follow-up helped keep the conversation moving.

Overall, I found the interview to be a great problem-solving discussion rather than just a coding test.

Hope this helps someone preparing. Good luck to everyone interviewing!