I connected with a recruiter and secured an onsite interview in Mountain View.

Google's recruiter was friendly and set up the onsite. There were five rounds of technical interviews.

Although the position title was "Machine Learning Engineer," the interviews were entirely coding-focused. There were no questions about machine learning.

It was strange; even when I proposed my own algorithm, the interviewers did not seem to like it and asked me to think and follow their approach. It appears you're expected to provide their "standard correct" solution.

Two interviewers stated the questions very vaguely, making it more about understanding the prompt than about algorithm design.

I did not receive an offer within a week.

Overall, Google seems to look for software engineers, even if you applied for a specialized role. If you want to work in machine learning at Google, you likely need to be famous or known by someone famous.

Questions from LeetCode may be asked.

But if they sense you knew the problems before, they will change the problems, which they may not be very familiar with themselves.