I recently completed the full Google Software Engineer Virtual Onsite interview process. Overall, the coding rounds focused much more on abstraction, communication, and handling changing requirements than simply solving LeetCode problems. Behavioral questions were also highly conversational rather than scripted.
The onsite consisted of four independent interview rounds, each evaluated separately. Preparing for each round individually is much more effective than treating the interview as one long session.
Round 1: Behavioral Interview (45 Minutes)
My interviewer was an Asian engineer who started with casual conversation about the weather, TV shows, and how long I had been in the U.S. The atmosphere was relaxed before moving into behavioral questions.
Main Questions
- What interests you most about Google?
- Why do you want to join Google?
- What was your specific responsibility in your resume projects?
- Which project was the most challenging and why?
- How do you handle disagreements within a team?
Round 2: Behavioral + Coding
The interviewer was from India. The speaking pace was relatively fast, but the interview was well structured.
Behavioral Questions
- Why Google?
- Describe a time when you identified and mitigated a technical risk.
Coding Problem: Merge Intervals
The coding question was the classic Merge Intervals problem.
The expected solution was straightforward:
- Sort intervals by starting time.
- Greedily merge overlapping intervals.
- Overall complexity: O(N log N).
Follow-up
How would you merge intervals that cross midnight, such as 23:00–02:00?
A clean approach is to split each cross-day interval into two normal intervals before performing the standard merge algorithm.
Round 3: Coding Only
This interviewer was from Korea and created the most relaxed atmosphere of the day. There was almost no behavioral discussion—we went straight into coding.
Coding Problem
Group binary tree nodes by the round in which they would be removed if leaves were deleted repeatedly.
The key observation is that each node's "removal round" equals its height from the nearest leaf.
- Perform a post-order traversal.
- Compute each node's height.
- Group nodes by height.
Google frequently asks tree-related questions. More importantly, interviewers evaluate how clearly you explain your reasoning and communicate during implementation.
Round 4: Coding + Behavioral
Behavioral Questions
- How do you ensure delivery of critical projects under limited resources?
- How would you explain a complex technical concept to non-technical stakeholders?
- Describe a time when technical innovation improved your team's efficiency.
Coding Problem: Email Address Normalization
Normalize email addresses by:
- Removing dots (
.) in the local name. - Ignoring everything after a plus sign (
+). - Using a HashSet to count unique email addresses.
Follow-up
How would you process billions of email addresses?
Possible discussion points included:
- Hash-based sharding for distributed processing.
- Local deduplication within each partition.
- Kafka for real-time streaming pipelines.
- HyperLogLog for approximate distinct counting.
- Bloom Filters for duplicate detection.
Overall Takeaways
Google's interview bar is definitely high. Solving the coding problem is only the starting point. Interviewers pay close attention to how you:
- Abstract the problem.
- Handle changing requirements.
- Analyze edge cases.
- Communicate your thought process.
- Discuss scalability and system-level follow-ups.
If you're preparing for Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, or other major tech company virtual onsite interviews, practicing communication and follow-up discussions is just as important as practicing algorithms.
Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, and many other 2026 New Grad and Experienced Software Engineering interviews are currently ongoing.
At Interview Show, we specialize in North American software engineering interview preparation, including OA support, virtual onsite coaching, mock interviews, and real interview experience sharing. Our team has extensive experience with interviews at top tech companies and provides practical guidance based on recent interview trends.
Good luck with your interview preparation, and hope to see you land your dream offer!
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