Google New Grad Software Engineer Interview Experience — Timeline From OA to Team Matching

Sharing a timeline and prep experience, hoping team matching goes well for me.

Timeline
9/30 - role opened, submitted with a referral that same day
11/16 - received the OA, finished it 11/19, 11/26 next step: submit transcript
1/6 - R1 coding + BQ
1/8 - notified R1 passed, submit transcript + updated resume
1/15 - visa call (asked about status, whether I'd applied for EAD before, etc.)
2/4 - Bay Area R2 onsite
2/24 - email notified I'd moved into team matching

R1

Coding: the "design a restaurant waitlist" question that had shown up in interview reports before. I'd already done 500+ on LeetCode, and heard Google's questions aren't that hard, so I wasn't too worried about not being able to solve it. I focused more on communication:

1. explain the brute force approach first + analyze time/space complexity -> then talk through the optimization, make sure the interviewer and I are on the same page before I start coding (to avoid going in the wrong direction)
2. write more comments while coding
3. when practicing LC normally, try narrating while you code, or find a friend to mock interview with, so you don't get stuck on English terminology

BQ: 45 minutes, a lot of questions, pretty intense. When preparing I used a question list compiled in a post here — even though it's a few years old, a lot of the questions still came up.

Stories: I originally planned to prepare a story for every LP, but realized I didn't have that many stories to tell or that much time to prepare. I ended up with about three stories, each covering multiple LPs.

Hypothetical: I prepared answers based on the questions in that post above, and I also remembered a few key points from another post here (I couldn't find the link again) that I tried to lean into when answering:

• teamwork awareness
• a customer-service mindset
• whether you can find direction and make progress under uncertainty
• whether you can push past obstacles and break out of default patterns
• whether you can take other people's suggestions and feedback
• whether you can manage tasks
• whether you can finish on time
• whether you're someone who pursues personal growth

Besides mocking with friends, I also paid for two mock BQ interviews, and they felt pretty helpful as practice (happy to go into detail in the comments if anyone's interested).

R2

Two coding rounds: one recursive problem, one tree BFS problem. The follow-ups were pretty practical (recursion stack overflow, what problems come up if the tree gets too deep and how you'd handle that).

Most of my R2 prep time went into LeetCode's Google-tagged questions (way less time than R1).

Before R2 I reached out to a recruiter to schedule a mock interview through Google's official mock-interview program: 45 minutes of mock interview + 15 minutes of feedback on your performance and where you could improve.

Hoping team matching goes smoothly.