Google L5 SWE

For Senior Software Engineer role at Google!

Total Experience: 7 years and 6 months
Current company: Amazon

Total 7 rounds (excluding team matching):
3 coding rounds
1 googliness round
1 system design round
-- hiring committee decided to have another coding round--
1 coding round
-- hiring committee decided to haveanother coding round since the interviewer gave lean hire (with L6+ engineer)--
1 coding round

Round 1: (Coding round)
Finding complementary numbers problem (Leetcode medium). Started with a naive solution. Optimised time in next iteration. Gave a distributed system solution to it. This round went pretty well.

Round 2: (Coding round)
Leetcode medium level Tree problem. I could solve it, but I think the interviewer gave no hire, since I did not ask much clarifying questions, and jumped straight to the solution.

Round 3: (Coding round)
Medium level randomization question. At first I cam up with a messy approach, but the interviewer was patient to let me clean up my code and then optimize it further. Hire.

Round 4: (Googliness)
Behavioral round. went well, do STAR preparation. Tell me about a time kind of questions. I came up with some question templates, and came up with a pattern to answer, with the help of chatgpt. Went pretty well.

Round 5: (System design)
This one also went pretty well. Interviewer started with simple role based access control system, but then went more complex. Experience in Amazon and watching random youtube videos of design patterns helped.

After this recruiter reached out to me for team matching, I had talked with 4 teams. 3 teams were not compatible, either they didn't like me, or I did not want the location, etc. 4th team said yes, then recruiter went for Hiring Comittee. Hiring Comittee suggested another coding due to no hire in coding

Round 6: (Coding round)
This was the most disappointing round, not because the interviewer gave lean hire, but because he had gave an impression that I did awesome. He asked a medium question, and I solved it in 10 minutes. He said nothing else I need to ask you, and going on with his BS for remaining 35 mins. :/

HC said another round because of lean hire, with L6+ to resolve the conflict

Round 7: (Coding round)
This was awesome round Leetcode hard DP, solved it properly. Got Hire

After that as well drama not over, the team matched somehow turned after asking me to wait for 3-4 weeks, but fortunately I got even better team, and they gave the offer after that

I accepted!

Overall period was almost 6 months! The coding round themselves were over in a month, but then HC, multiple followup rounds, team fitment rounds took very long time

Preparation strategy

Coding: Practiced on leetcode, breadth is important. All topics I covered, with mostly medium questions, and a couple of hard ones too. Start with easy if you are not confident in any topic. I don't think how many question you solve is important, as long as you are sure you got hold of a topic.

Design: Amazon experience helped. Codekarle youtube channel is pretty good, maybe not for final preparation steps, but to gain understanding of all the concepts. A few videos almost cover everything. If any specific topic you are not sure of, search it on Youtube, and some awesome person will have an intuitive video.

Compensation post: https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/5456292/google-bangalore-sse-l5-offer