I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Google (Seattle, WA)
Interview
For PhD 2025 New grad SWE role. This happened in April. The recruiter reached out, and I applied for the role. It was a very chill interview, about 45 minutes. Started with a bit of intro, and then jumped straight in the question.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The question was:
Given a sparse bit array A of size M stored in a database. The database provides an API query(L,R) which returns 1 if there is at least one bit equal to one in A[L..R] and 0 otherwise.
You want to find all the 1 bits in a reasonable number of queries. E.g. for array 01100000001, positions of 1 bits are {1, 2, 10}.
Return the array of all the positions of 1's.
T.C -> It should not be linear.
S.C -> It should be constant.
You should not use recursion or extra function. (this part was the followup to the recursive and queue approach)
1 coding assessment. If you pass, you get to the final round which consists of 4 rounds in one day. 3 technical and one behavioral. The algorithms I had was BFS, Min heaps, and backtracking(parentheses)
Got an OA first.
And an interview call.
Question was backtracking leetcode.
i would say a medium-hard question . I was able to solve it but still got rejected. I was hoping for second on site round. idk why .
But i think my interviewer is not in interested in my code like she is not even correcting me.
I applied online. I interviewed at Google (Seattle, WA)
Interview
I applied online with no referral. First was an online coding challenge then 4 virtual onsite 45 minute interviews. I had a call with my recruiter to learn about the details of the interview process. They were 3 technical interviews and 1 behavioral.
