Google L4 Interview Experience & Timeline

Timeline

Applied: 10/30

OA received: 11/06

First round: 11/21

Second round: 11/28

Third round: 12/03

Fourth round (onsite): 12/13

HR call & received team match form: 12/15

Below is my interview experience. Google’s interviews were conducted via Google Meet with an online editor (no syntax highlighting; code was written manually). We started with some brief small talk and a quick overview of my background, then moved straight into the problems.

First Round – Coding

This was an interval-related problem, similar in spirit to Meeting Rooms III (roughly similar). I spent about 10 minutes clarifying the problem requirements. I then presented an optimal solution. During the dry run, I fixed a small bug, simulated two test cases, and discussed time and space complexity. The interviewer was very satisfied with my solution.

Second Round – Coding

The task was to handle multiple interval queries on an array and determine whether the subarray within each interval satisfies the condition that adjacent elements alternate in parity. The approach was to perform a one-time preprocessing step to build an auxiliary array that marks whether adjacent elements have the same parity. For each query, we simply check whether there exists any pair of adjacent elements with the same parity within the interval, which allows each query to be answered in constant time.

Third Round – Coding

Given an array nums, find the shortest contiguous subarray that contains at least k distinct integers. If no such subarray exists, return -1.

Fourth Round – Behavioral / Project Discussion

This round focused entirely on discussing my personal projects and internship experiences, along with several behavioral (BQ) questions, future plans, and the classic question: Why Google? There was no coding in this round.

HR Feedback HR mentioned that the feedback so far has been positive, and I am currently in the team match stage.