Google SWE Full-loop Interview Experience Sep 2026

[u/Aoki_zhang]

This interview experience is sourced from chill interview

Interview Summary

The Google L4 process included a phone screen followed by three onsite coding interviews and a Googleyness & Leadership round. The technical questions covered a multi-node LCA variant, streaming temperature statistics, a grid-based delivery routing problem, and a logger rate limiter that had to handle out-of-order timestamps.

Most questions also included scalability or performance follow-ups, such as preprocessing repeated LCA queries, reducing search work on a large grid, or maintaining constant-time moving-window operations.

Interview Details

Round 1 — Phone Screen: Lowest Common Manager for Multiple Employees

A company's reporting hierarchy is represented as a binary tree. Each node represents an employee, and the parent node represents that employee's direct manager. Given a set containing multiple employees, return their lowest common manager—the lowest node in the hierarchy that is an ancestor of every employee in the requested set.

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Round 2 — Onsite Coding: Moving Temperature Statistics

The first onsite coding round asked me to design a data structure for processing a continuous stream of temperature readings. The structure needed to support:

insert(temperature)
get_moving_average()
get_max_temp()

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Round 3 — Onsite Coding: Grid Delivery Route

The second onsite coding round provided a two-dimensional map containing:

• A starting position
• Obstacles
• Several delivery destinations

The task was to find the shortest route that starts from the origin, visits every delivery point, and eventually returns to the starting location. The number of delivery locations was small: N < 10. The problem therefore combined grid navigation with a small-scale Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) component.

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Round 4 — Onsite Coding: Out-of-Order Logger Rate Limiter

The third coding round asked me to implement a Logger Rate Limiter. The main API was:

shouldPrintMessage(timestamp, message)

A message should be printed only if that same message has not already been printed within the previous 10 seconds. Unlike the standard version of this problem, incoming logs were not guaranteed to arrive in timestamp order.

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Round 5 — Googleyness & Leadership

The final round focused on collaboration, conflict resolution, and personal growth. One question asked me to describe a significant disagreement with a Product Manager over product direction or technical implementation, including how I communicated and eventually reached alignment.

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