I was contacted on LinkedIn by a recruiter. Then, I had a phone screen with the recruiter, who went over the interview process and timeline.

I then had a technical phone screen with a Google engineer. The first time, the engineer failed to call me at the scheduled time. We rescheduled, and the phone screen consisted of a brief chat about my background but mostly focused on solving a problem using trees.

Since I had a deadline the next week for another company, Google was quick to fly me out to Mountain View for the onsite interviews.

My onsite interview consisted of four ~45-minute interviews with Google engineers. There was also a lunch interview, in which they do not gather feedback, which was supposed to be with a fifth person. He did not show, so I went to lunch with my second interviewer. This could have been intimidating for some candidates, but it is not the norm, and since I got along well with my interviewer, it was not a problem.

Each interview was based around a programming question. There were absolutely no questions about my resume, background, or interest in Google. Coding was done on a whiteboard, and they expected code to be compilable, although I was able to use pseudocode for some generic helper functions. All of my interviewers were highly intelligent, polite, kind, and seemed excited to be there. They gave me very useful hints when I ran into issues with my solutions.

I did not meet with a recruiter or receive a tour of the campus, which would have been nice. There wasn't any effort "selling me" a job at Google, but this might have been due to my tight deadline.

Overall, it was a good experience, and it seems like Google creates a great environment for their employees.

I signed an NDA, but my four interviewers asked questions involving trees, dynamic programming, recursion, and string searching. The problems were challenging but very solvable.