I had an interview for a software engineer position at Google. The process was quite difficult but very exciting. I had applied online and got an email for an interview after about two weeks.

The first round was a coding challenge that was done on Google Meet. The interviewer was super nice and explained the problem clearly. The task was to implement an algorithm to find the longest palindromic subsequence in a string. I made a mistake at first, but the interviewer was supportive and helped me get back on track. I solved it after some thinking.

After that, I had a 30-minute system design interview. They asked me to design a simplified version of Google Maps, and I totally blanked out. I tried to explain my approach but was not confident enough to draw the correct diagrams. They asked a lot of follow-up questions on how I would scale it, handle geolocation, and error handling. I didn’t feel I did well on that round.

design a simplified version of Google Maps