I applied through a referral and was contacted by a recruiter one week later.

Two phone interviews were scheduled, each lasting 45 minutes with a Google engineer.

The first one was split 50-50 between discussions about my background and coding questions, whereas the second one was more focused on coding and algorithms.

Given a string with repeated characters, e.g., 'aaaalllriiiii', write a function to encode it.

Replace any sequence of duplicate characters with <number>x<character>. For example, in that case, 'aaaalllriiiii' would become '4xa3xlr4xi'.

Only replace if it shortens the string.

Then, consider questions about edge cases:

• Empty string
• String with no repeated characters
• String with all the same characters
• String with mixed repeating and non-repeating characters