I applied online.

It was a pretty standard Google SWE loop to be honest: a recruiter chat that was super chill, just covering my resume, why Google, and what roles I was eyeing. The phone screen is where it got real. It was forty-five minutes with two coding questions on a Google Doc. Mine were a linked list plus a binary tree traversal thing. Coding without an IDE feels weird at first, but you get used to it if you have practiced raw. The onsite was the heavy part with five rounds.

• Four technical rounds, all DS and Algo: recursion, DP, graph-ish stuff, and general problem breakdown.
• The last round was Googlyness: team fit, how you handle disagreements, your favorite product, and what you would improve.

For seniors, they swap one round for system design, covering scaling, API tradeoffs, caching, and more. I practiced through LeetCode and other YouTube videos, but I also did a bunch of mocks on Prepfully. That honestly helped a lot with talking through my thought process instead of jumping straight to code. The interview was tough, but I would say it was fair. If your basics are solid, you are chill.

What is the best data structure to implement an autocomplete feature?