I was poached by a recruiter who felt my skills aligned with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). I had a total of four interviews: an initial behavioral interview, a theoretical technical interview, a phone screen coding interview, and finally an on-site interview. The whole process took about two months.

In my experience, Google tried to make the entire process extremely smooth and fair. They make you feel super special and provide a lot of information, study material, and time for you to do your best. They basically tell you what to study.

The first 'technical' interview was sort of a gauge of my skills. I was asked a bunch of basic computer science questions, as well as questions on other SRE fields that may be important, e.g., operating system and networking questions. I didn't have to excel in all of them, but I'm guessing doing generally well in at least one area is important. I got all the programming/computer science questions correct, as well as a good amount of the operating system questions.

The coding phone screen was actually not that hard. I think they focus on what you claim you were good at; in my case, it was Java.

The on-site interview was the 'hardest.' However, I'd say overall it was fair. The questions were pretty much CTCI-style, and I didn't encounter anything too difficult. But I messed up the first round because the interviewer was a classic elitist. Whenever I asked him questions, he made me feel extremely stupid. He was getting noticeably frustrated and, at the end, walked out with a passive-aggressive comment: "Well, good luck with the rest." The remaining interviews were okay, except for the system design question. I was faced with a sort of math-driven question with a bunch of numbers and components, which really threw me off. I performed terribly in this part, and I knew it was over for me at this point.

I received a rejection email about a week later and was lucky enough to receive feedback. I can see where I went wrong.

My advice to candidates is to study extremely hard, focus on the important areas they hint at, and finally, don't feel bad if you don't get it. I was told by the interviewers who conducted my system design interview that probably close to 50% of the employees at Google applied twice before they were hired.

Basic CTCI style questions – mostly around data structures.

System design question with lots of math and 'numbers every computer scientist should know'.