Google L5 SSE interview experience

For Senior Software Engineer role at Google!

Total Experience: 6 years and 9 months
Current company: Atlassian

Total 6 rounds:
3 coding rounds
1 googliness round
1 system design round
-- hiring committee happened before team match! Strange! --
1 team match

Round 1: (Coding round)
Medium DSA based problem. Stream processing. Started with a naive solution. Optimised time in next iteration. Optimised space in next iteration but with increased time. Optimised both space and time in next iteration. Was able to write code.

Round 2: (Coding round)
Leetcode hard level Dynamic Programming. But cakewalk for me. I had good practice with DP. Completed code in 15 minutes. Came up with optimised solution in 1 go. Ended up chatting with the interviewer for the next 30 minutes about life at google, etc.

Round 3: (Coding round)
Another Leetcode hard level Math based problem (Probabilities and Randomisation). The code was just 1 line inside of my Main() function in Java. The real challenge was to derive the solution. Was able to somehow derive the solution. The interviewer seemed satisfied and was able to write the code. Had a bad feeling about this round, but somehow cleared.

Round 4: (Googliness)
Behavioral round. Tell me about a time when XYZ happened and how did you handle it? Tell me about a time when you f#ck@d up and what did you do in that situation? Such types of questions. Trust me, even if all coding and system design rounds can go well but one can still mess up the interview in this round. Learn about STAR method, use chatgpt to help you build answers and fit them in STAR. Take this round as seriously as you take coding and system design.

Round 5: (System design)
Thanks to 3 things, I was able to crack this round. Not just crack but enjoy it thoroughly. This round was the best of all:

My amazing experience at my company before I joined Atlassian
Designing Data Intensive Applications by O'reilly media
Extensive use of ChatGPT (free version). I literally asked it to play the role of an interviewer at Google and evaluate my design. I would literally write down all my FR, NFR, capacity estimations, took its feedback, then write down about all the components involved, data stores (when? what? why? pros and cons), message queues (which and why), etc. And chatgpt evaluated my design. Initially chatgpt would give me many red flags. But it helped me raise my standards to the extend of not just building the core system but also talk about implementing logging, metrics, audit, data analytics, security, privacy, etc. This shows the interviewer how in-deep can you think about a system.

Hiring committee happened before team match as hiring managers were not hiring and/or they didn't like my resume as it was weak. So my recruiter thought she could just let my packet through HC first as my feedback was good. Luckily HC passed my packet. This made a Hiring Manager want to interview me.

Round 6 (Team matching)
Hiring manager of one of the teams in Google cloud interviewed me. We talked in depth about their product, their team, my experience, my projects, weaknesses in my resume (I would have lost my confidence had I not interviewed with many other companies and messed these questions up). The interview was supposed to last 45 minutes but it went upto 1 hour and 10 minutes. This gave me a lot of confidence about my changes at Google this time for L5 role.

Got a call from my recruiter the same night informing that the HM is willing to have me in the team. And the life long dream of my childhood came true to be a part of Google. :D

I accepted the offer.

Compensation details: https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/4820502/google-bangalore-sse-l5-offer/