Pathrise Guide
How to Get a Job at Google
About this guide
These pages are meant to provide helpful information about how to get a software engineering, product manager, data science, and designer job at Google. Being prepared and knowledgeable is a key to every step of the hiring process. You can tab through each part of the guide to see information that can be helpful to your stage from office location for those trying to figure out if a company has a presence in your city of choice to real world interview questions. These guides contain much of the same information we have Pathrise fellows review before they apply or interview for a job with Google for roles including Software Developer, Mobile Developer, Software Engineer, Web Developer, Software Architect, Computer Programmer, Machine Learning Engineer, Data Scientist, Data Analyst, Data Engineer, Product Designer, UI Designer, UX Designer, Experience Designer, Web Designer, Product Manager, and Technical Product Manager and other tech, data, and product related roles. We hope you find these helpful and if you have content that you think we should add or think we got anything wrong, please email us at [email protected] and let us know.
- A prestigious legacy company in Silicon Valley
- Technical employees are typically not required to go through behavioral interviews
- A pioneer in workplace culture with extensive office amenities available to employees
- There have also been reports that there is pressure to conform with the culture and that it has gotten more competitive as the company has continued to grow.
The interview process takes 4 weeks on average.
Stage 1: An initial phone screen with HR
The recruiter will call to discuss the candidate's job interests, location preferences, they will outline the entire process and suggest study materials for preparation
Stage 2: A 1 hour technical phone interview.
This coding session includes basic questions about previous projects and solving a coding problem in a google doc.
Stage 3: An onsite interview consisting of 5 interviews
The onsite interview has 5 rounds plus one lunch interview. The questions are organized into 3 categories - Coding, Design and Open ended questions and interviewers are required to make sure all these categories are covered thoroughly.
In each technical interview the candidates talk to one engineer and solves technical problems on a whiteboard. At the end the of the interviews, the interviewers submit their reviews to a hiring committee, which has the final say on the offer.
One thing several candidates mention is that referrals by a current Google employees, can get you past the technical screen and directly to onsite.
The interview process takes 2-4 weeks on average.
Stage 1: Initial phone screen by HR.
Stage 2: A technical phone interview.
The interview usually involves a link to a Google Doc where the candidate is expected to solve a coding problem.
Stage 3: Occasionally a take home project can be assigned between the technical phone screen and the onsite, but not always.
Stage 4: An onsite interview.
The onsite usually includes 4 separate interviews with questions about stats, coding, and data analysis
The interview process takes 4 weeks on average.
Stage 1: Initial phone screen by HR.
Stage 2: One or two technical interviews with a hiring manager or a designer.
This includes deep dive into the candidate's portfolio, a detailed resume review and sometimes an app critique. If these interviews are well done, next is a design challenge/test (choose from three scenarios and design solutions to the problems described).
Stage 3: The onsite interview.
The onsite consists of a two part design presentation to a group of about 8-10 designers from different teams across Google. The first part of the presentation is the design challenge and the second part is presenting a project from the candidate's portfolio. After the presentation session there is a series of one on one interviews with the same designers that the candidate presented to that morning. In total there are about 6 one on one interviews which include mini design challenges, technical and behavioral questions.
The interview process takes 2-4 weeks on average.
Stage 1: Initial phone screen by HR.
Stage 2: A technical interview with a Product Manager. The questions are mostly general, then centered around a theoretical problem.
Stage 3: An onsite interview consisting of 5 45 min interviews, 4 product focused interviews with product managers and 1 technical interview with an engineer.
- Design an online battlefield game - What would be the protocols between the server and the client, the algorithms and game flow to decide the state of the game, and some basic networking.
- How would you design Google images?
- How would you design an efficient algorithm to find which number appears the most times in a sorted array.
- Write code that prints the Cartesian product (row by row for each combination) of a given list of lists (that contain integers).
- Find longest word from dictionary that can be made from given characters. How will you do it if '*' (matches one wild character) is also included?
- Design an access card system.
- Given a set of points, find the line with max points on it.
- Compute the area of a polygon.
- Write a class to define a deck of cards, and write shuffle function for the cards.
- Prove P = NP
- Given a sorted matrix where the number below and right of you will always be bigger, write an algorithm to find if a particular number exist in the matrix. What is the run time of your algorithm.
- How would Google transfer data between a phone and its cloud when it doesn't own the cell tower?
- What is the difference between Java and Python?
- Reorganize array of numbers in "s1 < s2 > s3 < s4 >…. " fashion. The numbers may include duplicates.
- In Python, what is a generator?
- How would you find the longest substring of a string containing only one character? this was then expanded to two characters, etc.
- How would you reverse just the vowels in a string?
- Given a start and end position on a chessboard if you are only allowed to walk diagonally, how many steps do you need to take to get to the end position?
- Explain a probability distribution that is not normal.
- If two predictors are highly correlated, what is the effect on the coefficients in the logistic regression? What are the confidence intervals of the coefficients?
- K- mean and Gaussian mixture model: what is the difference between K-mean and EM?
- When using Gaussian mixture model, how do you know it is applicable?
- If the labels are known in the clustering project, how do you evaluate the performance of the model?
- You have a google app and you make a change. How do you test if a metric has increased or not?
- Derive the Gaussian discrimination method under three different cases. Robust linear regression. Bayesian probability calculation. Random Markov Field. RNN.
- Coding in R, multiply all a[i,j] in a i rows j columns dataset.
- How can you tell if a given coin is biased?
- Make an unfair coin fair
- Find the width of the confidence interval
- Tell me about a product that you really love and why. How could it be improved?
- Design a kiosk animation
- How could you describe interaction design to someone don't know interaction design?
- Design a few fake websites and redesign the amazon homepage
- How do you design an interface for a 1000 floors elevator
- Design a system for controlling a toy car with a smartphone.
- How would you design gmail labels so that people would use them more?
- Design an app for a community of Celiac's disease patients.
- Let's say we wanted to implement an Amazon Mayday like feature in Gmail. How would that work?
- When are Bayesian methods more appropriate than "Artificial Intelligence" techniques for predictive analytics?
- Take a grocery app - what would be the features you would suggest?
- If you were Product Manager of (unnamed product), how would you improve the functionality 10x of what it is now.
- What will be the impact of self-driving cars?
- How would you improve the in-store shopping experience?
- Pick a product you like/hate. Why. How would you improve it
- You have a startup for product category X. Design me a product.
- You are making a change to improve product X. How would you measure its improvement.
- The NBA championships are about to happen and you produce merchandise showcasing the winning team--but, you don't know which team that will be. What do you produce and how much do you produce to dress the stadium visitors with merchandise?
- Choose a city and estimate how many Piano Tuners operate there.
- Who should Google acquire?
- Tell us about your 3 favorite unknown android applications. Why?
- How much storage space do you need to store all the info from Google Maps
- Google wants to launch a competitor to Amazon's e-reader product. Let's brainstorm some ideas
Mission
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Vision
To provide access to the world's information in one click.
- Focus on the user and all else will follow.
- It's best to do one thing really, really well.
- Fast is better than slow.
- Democracy on the web works.
- You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer.
- You can make money without doing evil.
- There's always more information out there.
- The need for information crosses all borders.
- You can be serious without a suit.
- Great just isn't good enough.
- Mountain View: 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy
- Johannesburg: 35 Ballyclare Drive Building E
- Istanbul: Eski Buyukdere Caddesi No: 209
- Haifa: Building 30 MATAM, Advanced Technology Center
- Dubai: TECOM Zone, Dubai Internet City
- Tokyo: Roppongi Hills Mori Tower 6-10-1 Roppongi Minato-ku
- Taipei: No. 7 XinYi Road Section 5
- Sydney: 48 Pirrama Rd
- Singapore: 70 Pasir Panjang Road, #03-71, Mapletree Business City
- Shanghai: 100 Century Avenue, Pudong
- Seoul: 22nd Floor, Gangnam Finance Center 152 Teheran-ro, Gangnam-gu
- Mumbai: 3 North Avenue Maker Maxity, Bandra Kurla Complex Bandra East
- Melbourne: 161 Collins St
- Kuala Lumpur: Axiata Tower No. 9, Jalan Stesen Sentral 5
- Jakarta: Pacific Century Place Tower Level 45 SCBD Lot 10, Jl. Jend. Sudirman No.53, RT.5/RW.3, Senayan, Kby. Baru, Kota Jakarta Selatan, Daerah Khusus Ibukota
- and more..