In spring 2025, candidate “Alex” progressed through Google’s standard full-time SWE pipeline:

• A brief recruiter call to confirm role fit and schedule a 90-minute, two-question online assessment.
• Two back-to-back 45-minute Google Meet coding phone screens (one on serializing an N-ary tree, the other on array transformations).
• A “2 + 2” virtual on-site with:
  • Two coding rounds (DP-based good-subsequence and heap-driven task-scheduler problems).
  • A lite system-design exercise architecting a real-time step-tracking service for ten-million smartwatch users.
  • A Googliness-and-Leadership chat using STAR stories.

This was followed by hiring-committee review, multi-week team-matching conversations (ultimately choosing Firebase Auth), and a final offer call detailing base, sign-on, and equity.

Alex’s keys to success were six months of pattern-oriented LeetCode prep, disciplined think-aloud practice, and meticulous tracking of every interview milestone. However, they noted that next time they would compress interview dates and rehearse system-design more intensively.

Two Sum

Given an array of integers nums and an integer target, return indices of the two numbers such that they add up to target.

You may assume that each input would have exactly one solution, and you may not use the same element twice.

You can return the answer in any order.