I got referred internally. The recruiter screen was light, mostly asking 'Why Google?' and walking through my current EM role (team size, day-to-day, projects). Then, a technical phone screen with algo questions in CoderPad. One was to design a graph system to get the latest stock prices, and another was about a photo-sharing database for thumbnails.

The onsite loop was the heavy part: people management, project management, system design, and a coding/code review.

People management was situational, covering things like how I would spot burnout and convince a team to adopt new tech.

Project management was about how I handle projects with no clear end date.

System design was intense; I had to design a distributed system with load balancers and a caching strategy, and explain deadlock/livelock tradeoffs.

I chose the code review track instead of live coding. Basically, I walked through a document, called out bad variable names, missed edge cases, and suggested algorithm optimizations.

Overall, the interviewers were collaborative, but it was a long day for sure.

What helped me a ton was doing mock interviews on PrePefully with ex-Google EMs, especially for communicating trade-offs and structuring my answers well, because I sucked at them earlier, lol.

How would you design a system to monitor the performance of a machine learning model in real-time?