Google Software Engineer Interview Guide (2025): Process, Questions & Preparation

In 2025, Google continues to dominate the internet search market. Its search engine holds roughly 89 percent of the global market share and processes about 8.5 billion searches every day. During the first nine months of 2024, Google earned $144 billion from search-related revenue, highlighting the company’s strong financial position in this core area. At the same time, 2025 marks a critical pivot point as Google shifts its focus toward artificial intelligence. CEO Sundar Pichai has emphasized both the urgency and the exciting potential to reinvent Google’s products and processes to fit a future driven by AI technology.

Role Overview & Culture

To join Google as a software engineer, it’s important to understand their interview process. The job involves designing and building systems that can manage huge amounts of data. You’ll write reliable code that works well in real situations and take part in code reviews to keep the quality high. Google values “engineering velocity,” which means working quickly while making things easy to use and keeping them reliable. They encourage engineers to come up with new ideas from the ground up. For example, their “20% Project” lets engineers spend part of their time on side projects. This has led to major innovations like AdSense and Google News.

Engineers at Google also follow the rule “You Build It, You Run It.” This means if you create software, you’re responsible for designing, developing, testing, deploying, maintaining, and improving it over time.

Why This Role at Google?

Aspiring candidates often research the software engineer interview Google offers due to the significant impact engineers can have, developing technologies that affect billions of users globally. Google provides well-defined career tracks, with engineers progressing from entry-level (L3) through various stages like Senior Engineer (L5) and Staff Engineer (L6) up to Principal Engineer (L7 and above), with increasing responsibilities and leadership expectations. Compensation often includes generous Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), with L6 engineers potentially receiving $200K–$500K in RSUs annually, and higher levels earning even more.

Let’s now break down the Google software engineer interview process you’ll need to master.

Overview of the Interview Process

The Google software engineer interview process is a multi-stage evaluation designed to assess both technical depth and cultural fit. The Google interview process for software engineer candidates typically includes:

• Application & Recruiter Screen
• Online Assessment
• Technical Phone Screens
• Virtual Onsite Loop
• Hiring Committee

Application & Recruiter Screen

To start your journey as a software engineer at Google, go to their official careers site and search for roles that match your skills and location. Before applying, read the job description closely, especially the “preferred qualifications,” which often mention languages like C++, Java, or Python.

Your resume should match the role. Highlight your skills, show clear results from past work, and include keywords from the job post to get through Applicant Tracking Systems.

After you submit your application, Google recruiters will review your resume to see if your background matches what the role requires. If your resume makes it past this first step, a recruiter will reach out to schedule an initial phone call. This call typically lasts 20 to 30 minutes and focuses on your experience, technical strengths, and your reasons for wanting to join Google.

Online Assessment

For some candidates, particularly if you’re a new graduate, an Online Assessment (OA) may be the next step after CV approval, though recruiters might sometimes skip this for certain roles. This assessment is typically a 60 to 90-minute timed test that you’ll have 5-10 days to complete once invited. It usually consists of two coding questions of relatively easy to medium difficulty, focusing on fundamental data structures and algorithms, such as problems involving 2D array manipulation, string splitting, finding the longest palindrome, or comparing strings. Passing the OA generally leads to the technical phone screen stage. However, recently, the OA is being phased out rapidly due to AI interventions.

Technical Phone Screens

The technical phone screen is a more in-depth evaluation, usually lasting 45-60 minutes. This interview is conducted via video conferencing tools like Google Hangouts or Meet, and you’ll typically be required to write code in a shared Google Docs environment or a collaborative coding platform, often with screen sharing mandatory. Expect to solve one or two algorithmic problems, writing around 30 lines of code for a problem, and clearly explain your thought process and solution. This stage heavily assesses your coding abilities, problem-solving skills, and understanding of data structures and algorithms.

Virtual Onsite Loop

The onsite (or virtual loop) stage is the most comprehensive part of the Google software engineer interview process, typically comprising 4-6 interviews, each lasting approximately 45 minutes. As of 2025, Google’s hiring process has become more structured, with increased scrutiny on the quality of solutions and tougher algorithmic challenges.

The onsite interview at Google usually includes three coding rounds. These focus on data structures and algorithms and test your ability to solve complex problems efficiently. Expect medium to hard-level questions, often with follow-ups that explore different approaches or optimizations.

For mid-level and senior roles (L4 and L5), one or two system design interviews are added. These assess your ability to design large-scale, reliable systems. You’ll need to explain architecture choices, scalability, and trade-offs. The questions are open-ended, so you’ll scope the problem, propose a high-level design, and then go deeper into specific components.

There’s also a behavioral interview, often led by a hiring manager, focused on “Googleyness.” This evaluates how you work in teams, handle conflict, and align with Google’s values. Interviewers ask about past experiences and decision-making.

Hiring Committee

After the virtual onsite, the next key step is the Hiring Committee review. This group of senior engineers makes the final hiring recommendation based on a full review of your interview performance.

Interviewers submit feedback within 24 to 48 hours, rating candidates. The committee reviews a complete packet that includes your resume, interview scores, internal referrals, and sometimes a hiring manager’s support statement.

Entry-Level SWE Differences

The Google entry-level software engineer interview (typically for L3 roles) primarily emphasizes strong fundamentals in data structures and algorithms across multiple coding rounds. Unlike interviews for more senior positions, there is generally no dedicated large-scale system design round, though basic design principles might be touched upon within coding problems. The focus remains squarely on problem-solving and coding proficiency.

Senior/Manager Track Differences

For senior individual contributors (L5+) and engineering manager roles, the interview process broadens significantly. Beyond advanced coding and system design, candidates can expect Google software engineering manager interview questions that delve into people management scenarios, team leadership, project management, and organizational design. These rounds assess experience in leading teams, resolving conflicts, making strategic technical decisions, and structuring engineering organizations for effectiveness.

Google software engineering interview questions cover a range of technical and behavioral topics, and understanding what to expect in the Google software engineering interview is essential for effective preparation.

Coding / Algorithm Questions

This part of the Google interview process for software engineers emphasizes core problem-solving skills through questions on algorithms, data structures, and efficient code implementation:

1. Write a query to find the top five paired products and their names

To find paired products often purchased together, join the transactions and products tables to associate transactions with product names. Use a self-join on the combined table to identify pairs of products bought together by the same user at the same time. Ensure that the first product in the pair is alphabetically less than the second to maintain consistency. Finally, group and order the results to count occurrences and select the top five pairs.

2. Write a query to create a new table, named flight routes, that displays unique pairs of two locations.

To create a table with unique pairs of locations, use a common table expression (CTE) to select the minimum and maximum of each pair of source and destination locations. This ensures that each pair is represented consistently, regardless of order. Then, group by these pairs to eliminate duplicates and select them into the new table.

3. Given two lists, identify the integer removed from one list

To solve this problem, sum all the numbers in both lists and subtract the sum of the second list from the first. This difference will be the missing integer. Alternatively, use a bitwise XOR operation on all elements of both lists to find the missing number.

4. Given two strings, write a function to determine if one is a subsequence of the other.

To solve this, traverse both strings from left to right. If a character in string1 matches a character in string2, move to the next character in string1. Continue this process until all characters in string1 are matched, indicating it is a subsequence of string2.

5. Reconstruct the path of a trip so that the trip tickets are in order

To solve this problem, build a directed acyclic graph (DAG) where each city is a node and each flight is a directed edge. Identify the starting city by finding the city that is a departure point but not an arrival point. Then, traverse the graph from the starting city to reconstruct the ordered path of the trip.

6. Given an integer array, write a function to return an array of integers so that subsequent integers in the array get filtered out if they are less than an integer in a later index of the array.

To solve this problem, iterate through the array while maintaining a dictionary to track the indices of each value. Sort the dictionary by values in descending order, and then iterate through it to build the output list by keeping only those values whose indices are greater than or equal to the current maximum index.

System/Architecture Design Questions

At this stage of the Google software engineering interview, candidates are evaluated on their ability to design scalable systems and thoughtfully structure data, with questions that vary by experience level:

7. Design a podcast search engine with transcript and metadata

To design a podcast search engine, consider indexing both transcripts and metadata to enhance search accuracy. Implementing a robust search algorithm that can handle natural language queries and return relevant podcast episodes is crucial. Additionally, consider user interface design for ease of use and integration with existing podcast platforms.

8. Explain a system/method to solve the problem of finding the top 10 closest related jobs for millions of new jobs per day

To efficiently find the top 10 related jobs for millions of new job postings daily, you can leverage NLP techniques like word embeddings to represent job descriptions and titles in a vector space. By pre-computing and storing these embeddings for the existing pool of jobs, you can quickly compute the similarity between a new job and existing jobs using cosine similarity or other distance metrics. This approach allows for scalable and efficient retrieval of related jobs by focusing on the most relevant features and reducing the computational load through pre-computation and efficient data structures.

9. What would the table schema look like if we wanted to track how long each car took coming into San Francisco to enter and exit the bridge?

To track the time each car takes to enter and exit the bridge, a schema with a crossings table is proposed, including columns for id, license_plate, enter_time, exit_time, and car_model_id. A separate car_models table is used to store car model information, with a foreign key relationship to the crossings table to efficiently manage data redundancy.

10. How would you design a data warehouse for an e-commerce company looking to expand internationally?

To design a data warehouse for an international e-commerce company, start by identifying the types of transactions to be recorded, such as purchases, restocking, and returns. Consider how to handle metadata and define events like returns. Address non-functional requirements like latency, frequency, duplication, load-bearing ability, and upgradability to ensure the architecture supports global expansion.

11. Design a pipeline that ingests images and PDFs of resumes and transforms them into queryable text data

To design this pipeline, start by using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to convert images and PDFs into text. Store the extracted text in a data mart for machine learning models and create a search API for recruiters. Ensure the pipeline minimizes turnaround time and consider assumptions like the accuracy of image-to-text models and the exclusion of privacy and security concerns.

Behavioral/Googleyness Questions

Google uses behavioral questions to assess culture fit and mindset, especially how you handle challenges, think at scale, and align with their values throughout the Google interview process for software engineers:

12. What do you tell an interviewer when they ask you what your strengths and weaknesses are?

For strengths, focus on traits that are valuable at Google, like problem-solving, writing clean code, or collaborating effectively. Use the STAR method to support your answer with a real example. For example, explain how your attention to detail helped catch a critical bug before deployment, improving system reliability.

For weaknesses, choose something real but not critical to the role, such as initially overengineering solutions. Then show self-awareness by explaining how you now prioritize simplicity and scalability early in the design process. Always emphasize how you’ve worked to improve the weakness.

13. How comfortable are you presenting your insights?

Presenting technical insights clearly is important at Google. You should explain that you’re comfortable presenting to both technical and non-technical audiences. Mention how you prepare—by simplifying complex concepts, using diagrams or metrics, and choosing tools like Google Slides or Lucidchart. Share an example of presenting a system design or performance report to stakeholders, including how you handled questions and feedback.

14. Describe an analytics experiment that you designed. How were you able to measure success?

Choose a clear example, like testing a backend optimization or a feature rollout. Explain how you framed the hypothesis, set up A/B tests, and selected success metrics like latency reduction or user engagement. Detail the tools used (e.g., BigQuery, internal dashboards) and how you ensured statistical significance. Wrap up by explaining how the results influenced engineering or product decisions.

15. Tell me about a time when you exceeded expectations during a project. What did you do, and how did you accomplish it?

Use STAR to keep your answer focused. For example, describe a project where you were responsible for implementing a feature but also identified performance issues in an unrelated area. After completing your task, you took initiative to optimize database queries, which reduced overall response time by 30 percent. Highlight how this wasn’t expected but had a clear impact on the system and user experience.

Effective preparation for a Google software engineer role typically involves dedicating significant effort to coding (around 60% of focus), such as arrays, linked lists, trees (binary trees, BSTs, tries), graphs (including DFS, BFS, Dijkstra’s), heaps, and hash tables, and algorithms.

Reinforce the preparation strategy with system design (about 25%, especially for L4/L5+ roles) through articulating trade-offs related to scalability, availability, reliability, fault tolerance, caching strategies, database choices (SQL vs. NoSQL), load balancing, and API design.

Mastering behavioral questions (25% focus) is also paramount. You should also review sample Google software engineering interview questions to familiarize yourself with common patterns and difficulty levels. To simulate actual interview conditions, engage in mock onsite sessions, practicing coding on a whiteboard or, more commonly, in a shared Google Doc without an IDE, which is a standard Google practice.

Clearly articulate your thought process as you solve problems, discuss trade-offs, and be prepared to explain time and space complexity. For behavioral rounds, use the STAR method and AI Interviewer to structure answers about past experiences, demonstrating teamwork, problem-solving, and “Googleyness”. Finally, ensure proficiency in at least one of Google’s preferred languages, like Python, Java, or C++.

What Is the Average Salary for a Google Software Engineer?

How Long Does the Google SWE Interview Process Take?

The Google software engineer interview process usually takes between 4 to 8 weeks from application to final decision. Timelines can vary depending on the role, team availability, and how quickly candidates move through each stage. The process includes application review, recruiter screening, technical phone interviews, virtual onsite interviews, and the Hiring Committee decision. Some candidates may also experience delays due to team matching or background checks.

Do Intern / Entry-Level Loops Differ?

Yes, the Google entry-level software engineer interview process differs slightly from full-time loops. For interns and new grads, the interviews focus more on fundamental coding, problem-solving, and data structures, with less emphasis on system design or behavioral depth. Entry-level candidates typically face two or three technical interviews, often with fewer follow-up rounds. The evaluation criteria are also adjusted to reflect academic experience rather than industry background.

Are There Manager-Specific Interview Rounds?

Yes, the Google software engineering manager interview questions differ from those for individual contributor roles. In addition to technical interviews, engineering manager candidates are assessed on leadership, team management, project execution, and decision-making. Expect questions about leading engineering teams, handling performance issues, driving delivery timelines, and making trade-offs. System design questions may also be broader in scope, focusing on how to guide a team through building scalable, maintainable systems.

Breaking into Google as a software engineer is not just about writing clean code. It is about demonstrating strong problem-solving abilities, clear communication, and a mindset aligned with the company’s engineering principles. The Google software engineer interview process is thorough, but with the right preparation, you can approach it with confidence.

If you are just starting your journey, begin with this step-by-step Python learning path. Looking for real-world inspiration? Read Simran Singh’s success story. Finally, explore our curated Python interview Questions to sharpen your skills. All the best!