I was contacted by a YouTube recruiter by phone, presumably after they saw my resume on LinkedIn.

After a phone screen, I was called in for a round of in-person interviews. There were about 6 people over approximately 4 hours.

From my understanding, Google usually conducts multiple on-site interviews. However, since I already had an offer from a major competitor, I convinced them to speed up the process and make do with only one on-site.

I received the offer about two weeks later and accepted it.

The questions were standard CS algorithm, design, and coding questions. Cumulatively, they were definitely the hardest round of questions I've ever faced. I don't remember them anymore, but they really made me think. Google lives up to its tough-as-nails interview reputation.

The phone screen was the hardest. It involved two separate concepts:

• A dynamic programming algorithm
• A trie data structure

Somehow, combining them made up the answer. I don't remember the exact question, but it involved storing the words in a dictionary into the trie structure and then using the algorithm to determine something.