Software Engineer interview
at Google.

Tell-me-about-a-time stories on ownership, conflict, and impact — scored against this company's real values.

1. 01 Tell me about a time you took ownership of a problem that was technically outside your assigned area.
2. 02 Describe a situation where you disagreed with a code review decision and how you resolved it.
3. 03 Tell me about a time you had to learn an unfamiliar system quickly to unblock a launch.
4. 04 Describe a moment when you received difficult feedback on your work and how you responded to it.

The hard screen for the craft itself — talked through out loud, not whiteboarded in your head.

1. 01 Given a stream of search queries, design a function to return the top-k most frequent queries seen so far in sublinear-per-query time.
2. 02 Find the shortest transformation sequence between two words where each step changes one character and must be a valid dictionary word.
3. 03 Given a large file of integers that doesn't fit in memory, find the median efficiently.
4. 04 Serialize and deserialize a binary tree, then explain the time and space tradeoffs of your encoding.

Open-ended design of the systems this company actually runs, with the interviewer probing your tradeoffs.

1. 01 Design Google Search autocomplete to return query suggestions with millisecond latency at planet scale.
2. 02 Design Google Drive to store and sync petabytes of files reliably across millions of users.
3. 03 Design the backend infrastructure for Gmail, including storage, search, and spam handling.
4. 04 Design a distributed unique ID generation service suitable for Google-scale write throughput.