A friend started referring me around September 2025. I had a recruiter screen in October, but the HM decided not to interview me. A team I applied to in February this year offered me an interview. The rough timeline:
3/9/2026
Recruiter reached out.
4/2/2026
RRK case, interviewed by a team member.
4/9/2026
Passed.
4/27/2026
RRK case + SQL, interviewed by a team member.
5/11/2026
Passed.
5/22/2026
Onsite: Googleyness, behavioral questions with someone from a neighboring team.
5/29/2026
Onsite: problem solving, case + behavioral questions with the HM.
6/15/2026
Rejected by the first team; they chose an internal candidate.
6/26/2026
A second recruiter reached out and said I needed an additional SQL round to complete the packet because the interviewer from late April hadn't submitted feedback.
7/1/2026
Additional SQL interview.
7/2/2026
Passed.
7/13/2026
First team-fit call with the skip-level manager, 45 minutes: two behavioral questions, an introduction to the team's projects, and Q&A.
7/23/2026
Second team-fit call with the hiring manager, 30 minutes: The HM asked what I expected from the work and, based on what I knew about the team, what work I thought I'd be doing. Five minutes were left for my questions.
7/29/2026
The second team rejected me after narrowing it down to two people. The same day, the first recruiter circled back with a new team to interview with.
8/6/2026
First team-fit call with the third team's HM, 30 minutes: The HM had prepared seven or eight questions. Apart from the standard ones about why I applied to this team, what I wanted to learn from it, and whether I had anti-abuse experience, the rest were about my understanding of the team or domain. For example, what were the team's two biggest challenges, what data would it use, and how would I prioritize incident response?
8/12/2026
Second team-fit call with the third team's tech lead, 30 minutes: The tech lead didn't ask any questions and left all 30 minutes for mine.
9/14/2026
A third recruiter reached out to match me with a fourth team. This team's team-fit calls weren't informal chats but two formal 45-minute interviews with written feedback: a case study with the HM, then a round with the skip-level manager that would probably cover statistics, judgment, and concepts, such as how to choose between two models. To avoid being asked about team details again as with the previous two teams, I requested a conversation with a team member before the HM interview to understand the team context and narrow my preparation scope.
9/17/2026
Rejected by the third team.
9/18/2026
Spoke with the fourth team's tech lead and asked questions. The scheduled 30 minutes became 45.
9/21/2026
Case study with the fourth team's HM. The scheduled 45 minutes became an hour.
9/22/2026
Verbal offer from the fourth team.
Here are the interview questions! It's been a long time and I don't remember everything clearly, but I've written down everything I can remember!
Case questions I was asked:
Design a spam detection system involving a classifier, an AI agent, and human labelers. The main goal is to improve the accuracy and efficiency of human review in the detection workflow.
Design the north-star metric for a classifier that flags whether the webpages being browsed are malicious.
We noticed a decrease in warnings displayed on webpages. How would you investigate?
Design strategies to balance fraud control and improvements to user experience.
Investigate a sales drop.
AI use cases and limitations.
A question someone had mentioned before: You get a time-series line chart, interpret the patterns, and infer what the metric might be. The interviewer asks lots of follow-ups based on your answer.
SQL:
The round whose interviewer didn't submit feedback had a 15-minute case followed by five SQL questions in 25 minutes, written in a Google document. The first four were roughly medium difficulty, with lots of ambiguous points that needed clarification. The fifth asked me to use the supplied tables to sketch out spam-detection logic. It gave two directions, and I had to pick one and write a query.
The additional SQL round had five questions in around 40 minutes, a mix of easy and medium with gradually increasing difficulty. The last was roughly medium-hard and a little more convoluted. Like the previous round, the prompts were ambiguous. I had to clarify the details with the interviewer to avoid missing a filter or join or misunderstanding the question. Before writing a query to calculate a metric, clarify the definition, numerator, denominator, and necessary tables and fields. Remember to anticipate and clarify edge cases: for a daily report, for example, do they want every calendar date, and should zeros be included?
Team match:
I learned a lot during team matching, more than I realized during the loop. The biggest lessons were not to trust recruiters too much and not to let their timelines push me along. As much as possible without delaying the process, prepare thoroughly and build a rough mental model of the team's business before interviewing.
Why do I say that? Two triggers:
- The first two recruiters both said team matching was an informal chat. Even though I'd studied a lot about the teams beforehand, without team context I couldn't get to the point on many questions. And half an hour really was too short for the number of questions they had. It was a shame those matches didn't work out.
- The third team I matched with was fairly technical. The recruiter said the team hadn't hired anyone in over half a year because the tech lead's round asked HTML basics and how to identify security threats in a JavaScript code snippet. She said I could interview with the hiring manager first and then the tech lead. I specifically studied for two weeks, but none of that came up: it was pure Q&A. All the difficult questions came from the hiring manager. I only developed my mental model after talking to the tech lead, so I hadn't been able to demonstrate it in the HM round. The experience was bad. The HM's internet cut out midway and she rejoined on her phone. She was in Singapore and only offered interview slots between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. Singapore time, so it was already very late for her when we interviewed. She left me only two minutes to ask questions before hanging up.
Because of those two reasons, before interviewing with the third team I specifically asked to talk to a team member first. It helped enormously in the HM round. I finally matched successfully, and they waived the final skip-level round too.
Other lessons: Don't assume. Think aloud when you're stuck and explain why you're stuck. For example, why does this case leave you unsure where to start, and what additional information would help reduce the ambiguity? When you're asked to design or improve something, don't jump straight to a solution. Ask the interviewer about the current state, why this needs to be designed, why it needs improvement, and what bottleneck they've encountered. A good interviewer will provide the context you need. Don't treat it like an exam; approach it like solving a problem with a stakeholder at work.
My only regret is that I have to relocate to the Bay Area. Such a hassle, aaah. But getting a match at all right now is already so hard—what more can I ask for? 😭
Finally, I hope everyone gets a good offer!!!
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