So, I recently went through the Google backend engineer interview process, and wow—it’s as intense as they say.

It all started when a friend referred me, and within a week, a recruiter reached out. The initial chat was pretty chill; mostly about my background, projects, and why I was interested in Google. I mentioned my experience with distributed systems, API development, and scaling microservices.

The recruiter gave me a rough idea of the upcoming rounds and told me to brush up on data structures and algorithms. I nodded confidently while quietly panicking inside. Still, it felt exciting to even get this far.

One question really stuck with me during a technical interview. The interviewer asked me to design a URL shortening service, like Bitly, but with a twist: it had to scale to billions of URLs and support custom aliases.

At first, I thought, "Cool, I’ve seen this on system design prep lists," but then they hit me with follow-ups about handling high availability, rate limiting, and eventual consistency across data centers.

We dove into:

• Hashing strategies
• Database choices (SQL vs. NoSQL)
• Cache layers using Redis

They asked how I’d prevent collisions and how I’d handle abuse, like people using the service for malicious links.

It turned into a full-blown distributed systems discussion, and my brain was both thrilled and slightly melting. Easily the most fun (and most humbling) part of the interview.