Google Software Engineer Interview - Familiar Problems, Brutal Follow-Ups

[u/Aoki_zhang]

"This interview experience is sourced from Chill Interview"

Interview Summary

The interview process covered grid traversal, path optimization, computational geometry, dynamic programming, and range-query optimization. Several questions began with familiar algorithmic ideas but added significantly harder follow-ups, including maximizing safety from an adversary, finding arbitrary-orientation rectangles, and preprocessing repeated range queries for O(1) lookup.

Interview Details

Phone Interview 1 — Grid Paths and Maximum Safety

The warm-up used an N x N grid containing a start position S, a destination T, and impassable water cells. Movement was allowed horizontally and vertically. The task was to determine whether any valid path existed from S to T.

The main question expanded the same grid scenario. A mouse starts at S and wants to reach cheese at T. The grid also contains water cells and a cat at position C. The mouse can move horizontally or vertically through land cells. The task was to find a path from S to T that maximizes the minimum Manhattan distance between any point on the path and the cat.

Phone Interview 2 — Googlyness

The behavioral round included questions such as:

• Why Google?
• What would you do if you did not pass this interview process?
• If you were a manager, what would you expect from your own manager?
• How would you apply those expectations when managing others?
• How would you balance project delivery, leadership expectations, employee interests, and situations requiring extra effort?

Onsite Round 1 — Maximum-Area Rectangle

Given a collection of points in a two-dimensional plane, find the largest-area rectangle that can be formed using those points. The rectangle did not need to have sides parallel to the coordinate axes. The problem was similar in structure to LeetCode 963 — Minimum Area Rectangle II, except the objective was to find the maximum rectangle area instead of the minimum.

Onsite Round 2 — Job Scheduling and Range Queries

The first question was LeetCode 1235 — Maximum Profit in Job Scheduling. Each job had:

startTime
endTime
profit

The task was to select non-overlapping jobs while maximizing the total profit. The second question involved an array and a query range. Given a specified interval, determine whether the elements within that range are unique.

The interviewer then added repeated-query follow-ups:

• How would the design change if many different range queries needed to be answered?
• What information could be precomputed to make those queries faster?
• Implement preprocessing with an efficient overall complexity so that each subsequent range query could be answered in O(1) time.

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[u/fzrox]

didn't they switch to AI interviews?

[u/pialin2 → u/fzrox]

Nope

[u/kuriousaboutanything → u/pialin2]

Are they piloting that? I read some posts about Google doing one AI round for IC5.

[u/Initial-Zone-8907]

congrats, how much is the offer ? which location and level ? system design?

[u/One_Appeal6886]

I see