Google

1. Application and resume screening

Apply on the Google Careers site, through a campus drive or with an employee referral. Recruiters and automated screening look for role-relevant experience, projects and, for new graduates, academic background and competitive programming or open-source work.

2. Online coding sample or recruiter screen

New-graduate and early-career software engineering applicants typically receive an online coding assessment with two problems to solve in about 90 minutes. Experienced candidates and non-engineering roles start with a recruiter call that covers your background and explains the loop.

3. Technical phone screen

A 45 minute video interview with a Google engineer solving one or two problems in a shared document, with emphasis on correctness, complexity and communication. Non-engineering roles get a role-specific screen, for example a sales scenario or an analytical case for gTech.

4. Virtual onsite interviews

Three to five interviews, usually spread over one or two days and conducted virtually even in 2025 and 2026. Engineers face coding rounds, a system design round for experienced levels, and a Googleyness and Leadership behavioural interview. Other functions get case, role-related knowledge and behavioural rounds.

5. Hiring committee and team matching

Interview feedback is compiled into a packet reviewed by a hiring committee that decides independently of the interviewers. Candidates who pass are then matched with a specific team, which may involve short conversations with prospective managers.

6. Offer and onboarding

The recruiter presents the offer including base salary, bonus and Google stock units. Background checks follow. The full process typically takes six to ten weeks, longer if team matching is slow.

The rounds below describe the software engineering loop, with notes on how other functions differ.

Round 1: Online coding assessment

Roughly 90 minutes, two problems, usually on a standard platform. Automated grading looks at correctness on hidden test cases, so handle edge cases carefully.

• Arrays, strings and hashing
• Greedy and sorting-based problems
• Simple graph or tree traversal

Round 2: Technical phone screen

A 45 minute interview with an engineer. You write code in a plain shared document without autocomplete, so practise writing syntactically clean code by hand and talking through your approach before coding.

• Medium difficulty problems with follow-up constraints
• Time and space complexity analysis
• Testing your own code with examples

Round 3: Onsite coding interviews

Two or three 45 minute rounds with different engineers. Problems can be medium to hard and interviewers care as much about how you reason and respond to hints as about the final solution.

• Dynamic programming and recursion
• Graphs, heaps and interval problems
• Data structure design questions

Round 4: System design

For experienced engineers at mid-level and above. A 45 minute open-ended design discussion covering requirements, scale estimates, data storage, APIs and trade-offs.

• Design a URL shortener or a news feed at global scale
• Consistency versus availability choices
• Capacity estimation and bottlenecks

Round 5: Googleyness and Leadership

A behavioural interview, now a standard part of every loop, with situational and past-experience questions. Interviewers assess how you navigate ambiguity, work with others, take ownership and act with integrity.

• A time you disagreed with a teammate and how you resolved it
• Handling a project with unclear requirements
• Something you did that went beyond your role

Round 6: Role-related rounds for non-engineering roles

Sales, gTech, Operations and Program Management candidates get cases and role-knowledge interviews in place of coding, such as troubleshooting an advertiser's campaign, analysing a metrics dashboard or planning a launch across teams.