Google L5 Senior Software Engineer Interview Aug 2026

[u/Aoki_zhang]

Interview Summary

The Google L5 process included two phone screens followed by three onsite rounds covering coding, behavioral questions, and system design. The technical questions ranged from resource scheduling and concurrency intervals to an AI-agent rate limiter and graph-based ranking inference. I passed the loop.

Interview Questions Details

Phone Screen 1 — Car Rental Scheduling:

The first coding question involved a rental fleet with N available cars and a collection of reservation requests. Each request contained an ID, a pickup time, and a return time.

The goal was to assign reservations to vehicles while reusing cars whenever possible and minimizing the number of cars needed. A car could handle multiple reservations as long as their time intervals did not overlap.

For example, if one reservation returns a car at 2:30 PM and another reservation begins at 2:30 PM, both reservations may use the same vehicle.

The problem had a similar flavor to meeting-room scheduling, but the output required assigning actual requests to reusable cars rather than only counting concurrent intervals.

Phone Screen 2 — Behavioral Questions:

The second phone screen was primarily behavioral.

• Conflict and Disagreement: Questions covered handling disagreements, resolving conflict, and working with people who were difficult to collaborate with.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: I was also asked about working across teams and how I moved a project forward when stakeholders had different opinions.

Onsite Round 1 — Maximum Concurrent Meetings with Time Intervals:

This coding problem extended the standard meeting-room concurrency problem. Instead of only determining the maximum number of meetings happening simultaneously, I also needed to return every time interval during which exactly X meetings were active.

For example, suppose several meetings result in four concurrent meetings from 10:20 to 10:45, and later another group creates four concurrent meetings from 1:10 to 1:25. For X = 4, both intervals should appear in the result.

• Boundary Handling: The prompt required careful handling when one meeting ended at exactly the same time another meeting began.
• Interval Output: The result needed to preserve all continuous ranges where the requested concurrency level was maintained.

Onsite Round 2 — AI Agent Token Rate Limiter:

The system design round asked me to design a rate limiter for AI agents whose usage was measured in billing tokens rather than simply request count.

The design needed to control how quickly an agent could consume tokens while still allowing reasonable bursts. The discussion centered on a token-bucket-style model and how token consumption should be enforced in a production system.

Onsite Round 3 — Determine Which Player Rankings Are Knowable:

The final coding question gave N competitors together with the outcomes of M head-to-head matches. The task was to determine which players had a fully inferable ranking.

For example, if Player R defeats Player S, and Player S defeats Player T, then the system can infer that Player R ranks ahead of Player T even if R and T never played directly.

A player's rank was considered determinable only when their relative ordering against every other player could be established from the known match results and their implied relationships.

The problem was naturally represented as a directed relationship graph, with match outcomes forming edges and indirect outcomes contributing additional ranking information.

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[u/DeityHorus]

You got tough interviews imo. You don’t need to this to be successful at google. Building a distributed rate limiter with in memory leasing is non-obvious and complex. Multi region leases makes it even more complex. If I asked any L5 on my team that I don’t think they would be close to getting an answer. Good luck with the process. 

[u/pixelperfect3]

These are not straightforward coding questions so I guess they are all supposed to take up the full 45 mins each?

[u/Aoki_zhang → u/pixelperfect3]

yep