A recruiter reached out to me, having noticed that I interviewed for their internship last year. Since I would be graduating soon, they wanted to give me the opportunity to interview for their full-time software engineering position. I told the recruiter I was not ready to interview just yet, so I asked them to reach out again in about four months.

I received the coding sample in November. This consisted of two questions to be completed in 60 minutes. I only completed one question, but fortunately, this was enough to move me forward in the process for a technical phone interview.

I received positive feedback from the phone interview and was flown out to Mountain View for an onsite interview. This interview consisted of four technical interviews, one of them being a design problem, and lunch with a Google employee. During my onsite, there was a mishap with room availability, so I had to cut one of my technical interviews short. However, that did not impact my performance.

Ten days later, I received a phone call from my recruiter. Unfortunately, I did not receive the full-time offer, but the hiring committee believed that I could be better suited for their Engineering Residency program. There are three locations where you can pursue this role:

• Mountain View
• New York
• Seattle/Kirkland

Next, I was scheduled to do one more technical interview through Hangouts.

During the Hangouts call, the interviewer asked me about a particular project I worked on from my resume. Then, I was asked to begin the technical portion of the interview. Although I ran out of time, the interviewer let me ask questions about the Engineering Residency program, so ask as much as you can about it because it is still a relatively new program.

About two weeks later, I received an update that I passed the hiring committee and my packet had to go through one more review committee. The following day, my recruiter informed me that I had been officially approved for the Engineering Residency role.

I had a competing offer at the time, but their offer is non-negotiable for this particular position.

You do not need to finish every single technical problem they give you in order to receive an offer. I received a coding sample and a total of 6 technical interviews. I did not complete the coding sample, the design problem, and 3 of the other technical problems.

I used the "Cracking the Coding Interview" book to begin my review of data structures and algorithms. From there, practice coding on LeetCode.

Begin with the Easy questions. Once you’re more familiar and comfortable, try the Medium problems. You’ll most likely receive Medium over Hard questions since you only have 45 minutes per interview.

The concepts I utilized the most during my interviews were object-oriented design, dictionaries/hash tables, and sets.