I was contacted by a recruiter last year and had a series of initial conversations about my areas of interest and what opportunities were available at Google. In my particular case, Google waived the phone screen, and I was able to come directly onsite. I don't know if this is a common occurrence or not. A good chunk of my professional network is employed at Google - so I suspect that having some number of internal referrals may have helped. This is complete conjecture on my part, though. I came to one of the campuses in Mountain View in July 2016 for my onsite interview.

Initially, I had 5 interviews onsite. 4 of the interviews were coding sessions, and 1 interview was a system design question. The coding questions were challenging (one of them in particular I found to be quite difficult). The interviewers were good about making the sessions interactive and asking questions to help guide my thinking. While I cannot share specific questions - reviewing CS fundamentals (algorithms and data structures) will be helpful. The questions were similar to other ones I had been asked by other similar companies I was interviewing with or that I had come across online while studying. They're not quite the same but are similar in terms of topics covered and difficulty.

In all of the interviews, interviewers asked how I could optimize my solution to scale for extreme cases. They didn't necessarily want to see me code a solution that could scale to large traffic volume or lots of data, but they wanted to see if I had an idea on what I could change or improve to optimize what I had written. Make sure you're comfortable evaluating the time and space complexity of your code.

The interviewers were very cordial and were happy to answer any questions I had about what it was like to work at Google.

About a week and a half after my onsite interview, the recruiter had indicated that I had done well enough to move forward in the process. The next step was to match to a particular team. I spent about 2 weeks speaking with various hiring managers and technical leads before finding a team where we mutually felt that I would be a good fit for the team.

After I matched, my packet was then reviewed by an executive (an SVP of engineering). In my particular case, the SVP requested that I come in for one more additional system design interview. I'm not sure if this is a common occurrence or not. Based on my research online and speaking with some of my friends who work at Google, this usually isn't typical.

I came back to Mountain View one more time for a one-hour system design interview. After the interview, I was informed by the recruiter a few days later that based on my performance in the final interview that the SVP had approved my offer, and I accepted shortly afterwards.

In terms of time frame, the process was roughly 6 weeks from when I had my initial onsite interview to when I was extended an offer. In comparison to some of the other large companies I was interviewing with at the time, this was better than average in terms of latency (many of the other companies took longer to turn around a decision).

Overall, the process was pleasant. The recruiters who I worked with were extremely professional and very timely in their communication. They kept me in the loop constantly and responded to questions quickly. The engineers I spoke with onsite were all very nice and professional.

NDA.