Google

What is Engineering Residency?

Google's Engineering Residency program is designed specifically for recent graduates to help them transfer from school into the tech industry. Members go through 8 weeks of training to learn the Google way of engineering then serve 2 rotatations on teams throughout Google. At the end of the year-long program, the majority of the members transition to full-time roles at Google.

Interview Process

The interview process is very similar to the process for a standard full-time Software Engineer. The biggest difference is that there is no onsite for the final round, which makes it somewhat easier. Obviously I won't disclose any problems, but they all revolve around data structures and algorithms. To prepare, I solved almost 300 problems on Leetcode over the course of a few months. The entire interview, from intial contact to offer, took almost 3 months.

Interview Steps

1. Coding challenge consisting of 2 medium level problems
2. Phone interview
3. 2 consecutive phone interviews
4. 2 consecutive video interviews

In terms of difficulty, the problems I was asked were similar to the ones I got from Amazon and Facebook. Many of them fell in the leetcode-medium range, but sometimes there was a follow-up discussion on some problems that would be considered a leetcode-hard. In these cases a working solution wasn't expected, but they did expect you to explain how you would approach and solve the problem. For other problems were working code was expected, it had to pass all edge cases and run as optimally as possible. A brute-force solution won't always make the cut.

Check back after my start date to hear more about my experiences at Google!