I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Oct 2012
Interview
Got contacted by a recruiter for an EM role. Setup a 30 phone screen with the hiring manager. It was a general conversation about my background etc. No technical questions. Got inviited to a full day onsite. The onsite started with a 30 minute meeting with the recruiter during which he gave me the list of interviewers and told me about their backgrounds. This was followed by lunch with the hiring manager. The lunch conversation was very informal -- generally talking about Google, the challenges in their teams etc.
After lunch the ":real" interview started with a project manager, the hiring managers manager, 2 developers from the team and one developer from an other group. Got asked a mix of management/technical questions. One of the developers and the project manager were pretty arrogant and seemed like they didn't want to be there. The other guys were great! After the interview, got a call back from the recruiter to get feedback about the interview process. A week later, got a call from the recruiter telling me that they were not going to make me an offer.
Some of the questions that I remember:
- Design an in memory cache for webpages.
- Given a pattern and a string, write a function to determine if the string matches the pattern.
- How do you deal with low performers? High performers?
- Describe how you deal with change management.
- Describe in detail a project that failed.
- Describe a project in the past that was behind schedule. Provide concrete to steps that you took to remedy the siuation.
- Design a distributed id generation system.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They were standard interview questions -- nothing really unexpected.
Only talked to a recruiter - I'm still waiting for them to find the right fit. They presented multiple options and they've been able to move quickly. I'm scheduled to talk with multiple hiring partners
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Where are you currently located?
2. Are you open to relocating outside of your current location? If so, which U.S. locations are you open to?
3. If selected as the finalist, what is your ideal start date (Month & Year)? To set expectations accordingly, most hiring managers prefer start dates within 4 - 8 weeks after receiving the offer, if not sooner.
4. Do you require Google to sponsor U.S. work authorization for this position? If so, please specify if possible (e.g. OPT, H-1B transfer, etc.).
5. Which primary coding languages are you most familiar with?
6. Any prior work experiences with Google I should be aware of?
7. Which ML subdomain(s) most align with your domain expertise? Please select only 1-2 for now.
Recommendations/Ranking/Predictions (RRP), Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Speech/Audio, Machine Learning Infrastructure (i.e. Distributed Machine Learning), Reinforcement Learning, Generative AI, Other (please specify)
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Google (Ciudad de Mexico) in Mar 2026
Interview
Primero es una conversación usual de filtro de posición revisando match de experiencia. Luego explicación de todo el flujo, es largo. Solo realicé el primer filtro técnico que son dos sesiones de diseño/arquitectura de sistemas. Durante la explicación proveen bastante material como videos y FAQs. Incluso sugieren agendar una "mock interview" para preparar y tener feedback antes de la real. Esa fue la parte mala, ya que la agendé pero jamás me contactaron y por cuestiones de calendario me pidieron adelantar las sesiones que tenía para semanas mas adelante por lo que sentí que no me preparé adecuadamente
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Jan 2026
Interview
Recruiter screen > Tech screen (coding + projects) > Onsite. Onsite was 5 rounds: People, Projects, Sys design, Coding/Code review, and Googlyness. Tech screen had some graph/dsa stuff but not super hard, more about the tradeoffs. Onsite is interesting. People and project rounds are standard: handling conflict and growing teams, project management style and thought process. System design: large scale distributed stuff and tradeoffs, and a coding/code-review round: they give a choice; I did code review and walked through a doc spotting bugs/efficiency issues (+1 if you think out loud). Googlyness: leadership philosophies and working with cross functional teams. Google EM guides on blind and reddit were helpful, also some grokking for sys design refresh. And yeah a mock on prepfully with a google em and it was very helpful; helped me realize I was being too humble and not showing enough so to say “emergent leadership" which is a huge signal there. Joined a week ago and loving the campus lol
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
how would you design a system to monitor the performance of a machine learning model in real-time