I applied online, and a recruiter contacted me the next day. After a phone screen, a phone interview was scheduled, which went well.

The interviewer asked me to design a system with given criteria. I was able to define the system and write functions with optimal time and space complexities within 45 minutes. Thus, I was asked for an onsite interview.

There were five one-on-one interviews, each lasting 45 minutes. All interviewers asked questions on data structures and algorithms. Most of the questions were hard, and a couple of questions could be found in the LeetCode hard section.

I performed well in three out of five rounds, but was completely clueless in two of them. I received a rejection two days later.

My advice to aspiring Googlers:

• Focus on data structures and practice LeetCode hard questions on Dynamic Programming, Backtracking, Recursion, Binary Trees, and Graph Theory.
• In interviews, spend time to first understand the problem, try to solve it with a few test cases, and then construct a solution. Some questions they ask have short and straightforward solutions, but they require some logical reasoning and testing as well.

Questions on DP, Backtracking, Graph theory, and OOD.