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Software Engineer Interview Experience - San Francisco, California

August 1, 2024
Positive ExperienceNo Offer

Process

I applied online and received a recruiter call within a week to discuss my experience and role fit.

Next, I completed two technical phone screens, each approximately 45 minutes long, focusing on coding Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) problems, similar to LeetCode medium difficulty.

After passing those, I proceeded to a virtual onsite interview, which consisted of five one-hour rounds:

  • Three coding interviews focusing on medium-hard algorithms, arrays, and trees.
  • One system design interview on scalable file storage.
  • One behavioral round assessing teamwork and "Googleyness."

The coding interviews were conducted in a whiteboard style using a shared document.

The hiring committee reviewed all feedback, followed by a team-matching call before an offer was extended.

The entire process took approximately six weeks. It was intense but well-organized.

Questions

Write a function to find the longest increasing subsequence in an integer array, optimizing for time complexity better than O(n^2).

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 142 interview experiences for the Google Software Engineer role in San Francisco, California.

Success Rate

9%
Pass Rate

Google's interview process for their Software Engineer roles in San Francisco, California is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.

Experience Rating

Positive55%
Neutral28%
Negative17%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for Google's Software Engineer interview process in San Francisco, California.

Google Work Experiences