🚀 Google L4 Software Engineer Interview Experience
💼 Experience: 3+ years
👨💻 Current Role: Software Engineer at FAANG, India
🎓 Education: B.Tech, CS, India
📝 Application
I randomly reached out to a recruiter on LinkedIn, and she scheduled a call with me. During the call, she discussed my current work experience, expectations, reason for switching, and expected CTC. Based on this, she scheduled the Google Hiring Assessments.
📞 Round 1 — Online Assessments (Googlyness + DSA)
⏱️ Googlyness Duration: ~30 minutes
⏱️ DSA Duration: ~60 minutes
The Googlyness OA is like a behavioral interview assessment where you have to respond to different situations and scenarios, similar to the Amazon Work Style OA. It was pretty boring, but if you maintain a consistent and appropriate persona, it is not that difficult to clear.
Once I cleared it, the recruiter gave me the DSA OA after 2 days. I don't remember the exact questions, but there were 2 DSA questions. The first was around strings (Medium), and the second was around DP (Hard). I was able to solve both, but at the very last minute. The next day, the recruiter told me that I had cleared this round as well.
For the OA, I think you should just keep practicing DSA and focus on maintaining your speed because the questions are a bit difficult. They monitor the webcam and have other proctoring measures in place as well.
The cooldown period is 6 months if you fail either of these assessments.
✅ Result: Hire
I received the result 2 days after the OA and was moved to the screening round.
💻 Round 2 — Googlyness Interview
⏱️ Duration: 45 minutes
I scheduled these two interviews around 3 weeks after the OA. In the behavioral interview, the interviewer was from Poland and asked me ~10 questions in 40 minutes. The questions were common and similar to what you would expect in a behavioral interview. For example: describe an ambiguous situation, talk about negative feedback, how do you manage work with remote employees, etc.
If you can apply the STAR principle to your work experience and prepare 7–8 actual projects or experiences, you should be able to answer almost any question thrown at you. But always be prepared for this round; don't take it lightly.
✅ Result: Strong Hire
💻 Round 3 — DSA Interview
⏱️ Duration: 45 minutes
The interviewer, from London, came in and asked me: Two Sum. I was extremely happy and solved it using brute force, then sorting + two pointers, and finally a hashmap. I coded the O(N) time solution perfectly and explained all the test cases and integer overflow considerations. He was satisfied.
Then, since we had 15 minutes left, he threw a math probability puzzle at me. The puzzle was:
You have two functions: F returns the 4 best advertisements for a user, while G returns the worst advertisement from any given set. Give me the best ad.
I came up with the following answers:
- Given N ads, call G N-1 times and get the top best ad.
- Given N ads, call F once and then call G 3 times and get the top best ad.
- Interviewer: What if you can only call G and F once?
- I said, then call F once, select any 1 ad randomly, and return it, with a 25% success rate.
- Interviewer: Improve this.
- I said, then call F once, call G and remove the worst ad, and then select any 1 ad randomly and return it, with a 33% success rate.
I was able to arrive at this 33% solution, but he kept saying, "Think of a strategy that can get you to more than 33%." However, I could never figure it out. Later, I realized from Gemini that there is a 37.5% solution.
I knew that I was cooked. I was expecting a Lean Hire after this, but... I got rejected.
❌ Result: Lean No Hire
Four days after the conclusion of both interviews, the recruiter scheduled a call to discuss the feedback and shared the final feedback with me.
📌 Final Outcome
❌ Rejected
Side Notes
- OA cooldown — 6 months
- Interview cooldown — 12 months
- If you clear the above 2 interviews, then 2 more DSA interviews are conducted onsite in Bangalore/Hyderabad.
I am currently also in interview loops with 2 other companies, apart from the ones already mentioned below. I'll share the interview experiences for those companies as well once I have the final outcomes. 🚀
At this moment, I do feel a bit disappointed with all these rejections. I have been actively preparing since last 6 months and failing to clear even the screening round at Google is a bit hard to swallow for me. But let's see, can't do anything else apart from working harder and maybe cracking something someday.
- Uber — Reject — Interview Experience
- Syfe — Reject — Interview Experience
- Kotak — Reject — Interview Experience
- SingleInterface — Reject — Interview Experience
