I was contacted by a recruiter out of the blue. I had no idea when I applied for the position, as the last time I sent out resumes was at least 6 months prior. The recruiter set me up for a phone interview, which lasted about 45 minutes. Ideally, they ask two questions: one easy and one hard, and you are asked to code in a Google Doc.

After I was done with the phone interview, I got a call the immediate next day saying I was selected for an on-site interview at Mountain View. I was pretty excited and set three weeks aside. On-site, there were 5 rounds, one of which supposedly does not count.

1. The first one was for the SWE position. One interviewer and one shadow. System design question. I bombed this one.
2. The second one was for SWE and SWET positions. A matrix navigation kind of problem. I did well towards the end, maybe I took too much time.
3. The third one was for SWET, a binary AVL Tree-based question. I was asked to write code solving a specific problem based on AVL trees. Once I was done with that, I was asked to solve for the reverse case of the problem. I solved both just in time.
4. The fourth one had an easy question to start things off and then a tough question. The easy question was just to warm up; the tough one was the proper one. It's essentially reading a tree off of a file. I offered a couple of solutions before the end of the interview. Towards the end, I somehow stumbled towards an optimal one.

I was caught a little off-guard by the system design question.

I actually like system design a lot and have worked on some complex distributed system designs before.

I guess the major confusion I faced with the question was that I did not understand the requirements.