Google | L5 Android

Timeline from first call to final offer
Approx 6 months, Feb - Jul

Experience
5+ years at the time of interviewing, across 4 product based companies.

LeetCode 'Experience'

Interview rounds
Apologies, I don't remember all the questions that were asked. But none of them were straightforward leetcode questions as far as I can tell.

Screening Round (Hire)
Simple string related question with a small follow up. Took approx 30 minutes in total
Could have done better with communication

DSA 1 (Strong Hire)

DSA 2 (Strong Hire)
Given an infinite ancestoral tree with child -> parent (both parents) relationship.
Find if two given persons are siblings
Follow up 1: Find if two given persons are first cousins
Follow up 2: Find lowest common ancestor
Note that it's not a usual tree with single relationship, every node here has two parents

DSA 3 (Lean Hire)
This was supposed to be an Android domain round as per my recruiter but there was some confusion in scheduling.
Very complicated problem of designing a logic for a logger. I was successfully able to provide a solution using sliding window approach but for the follow up question my approach didn't work. I had to come up with an entirely new algorithm, and hence took me sometime to figure out and rewrite all the code. The solution was correct (I think!) but was not able to code it fully. The interviewer looked satisfied though.

Googlyness (Strong Hire)
Typical scenario based questions. Although a lot of focus on leadership and team management skills. They asked me a lot of questions around my 'Team Lead' experience.

System Design Strong Hire
Design an app that controls a GOOGLE neon logo inside some office. Using the app, you can change the colors of each letter in the logo. Obviously this app would be used by multiple people so you need to handle concurrency, state management (local state of what is being shown on the app vs the actual logo itself), bad network cases and failures.
I loved this round, interviewer was very interactive unlike others where they just sit back and let you struggle.

Since I had one not-so-great round, I was a bit skeptical that I'll get L5. But eventually I got a great team match that aligned with the type of experience they were looking for. I had a great VP recommendation, apparantely.

Final offer
L5 Android

Compensation details: https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/5597698/google-l5-android-bangalore/2561004