A recruiter reached out to me in early October via email.

I had two informal calls with her and then interviewed at Google in mid-October for two back-to-back interviews. A week later, I was told I had made it to the hiring committee, and the next day, I was informed I had passed.

During another call with a recruiter at the end of the same week, I was given the choice of an open offer or proceeding to the traditional host matching phase.

I accepted the open offer the following week.

First interview: Knowledge questions and basic LeetCode-easy level questions.

Second interview: Significantly more difficult combinatorics and graph-traversal questions.