Google Software Engineer Interview Experience — Rejected, Then an R1 Invite Two Weeks Later

I got the referral from a friend for the SWE III role. Three days after I applied I was already rejected — but then two weeks later the recruiter suddenly sent me an R1 invite, so I went ahead and did the interview.

1. Coding — no self-introduction, straight into the problem. The question was roughly: given a graph where every edge has a safety value, and a given safety threshold, find the minimum safety value needed to get from the start node to the end node, where every step along the path has to stay below that threshold; if no such path exists, return -1. Similar to LeetCode 1631.

2. Standard behavioral, asked one question at a time in a very by-the-book way:

• Describe a challenging project — specifically, what made it challenging
• What would you do if a coworker fell behind on their part of a project
• What would you do if your manager gave you an unusually difficult task — have you run into something like that before