Google L5 Reject -- Bengaluru -- Ph.D.

Hello Everyone.

I am sharing my interview experience at Google Bengaluru. Distributed learning team (Berlin HQ), MLOps role. I was contacted by a recruiter in the month of February.

Telephonic Interview

Nice and humble interviwerer. I got stuck at one point, where she pointed out an errornous assumption I was making.

Question.

Given two strings $s_1$ and $s_2$, where $len(s_1) >> len(s_2)$, find the minimal substring $s_k$ in $s_1$ such that $s_2$ can be constructed by picking letters from $s_k$ one or more times. Return the first and (last - 1) index of the string $s_k$ in $s_1$.

• https://leetcode.com/problems/stickers-to-spell-word/description/

How I solved.

String Manipulation -> substring window
DP Approach -> 
Suffix Tries -> Largest suffix to ignore.

Verdict

Hire

Round-1 Interview

Question.

Given an array of numbers, where $i \leq a[i] \leq i^2$, find the largest subarray with sum, $s$ such that $s \neq n \bigwedge s < n^2$ where, $n$ is the size of the array.

• maximum-size-subarray

How I solved.

Verdict

Strong Hire

Round-2 Interview

Question.

Similar to House Robber - III.

• House Robber - III

How I solved.

Verdict

Strong Hire

Round-3 Interview

Question.

LRU Cache implementation with a tweak.

• LRU Cache

How I solved.

Verdict

Lean

Round-4 Interview

Interviewer was in a hurry. Gave vague constraints. He asked my what was the motivation to do a Ph.D. in computer science?

Question.

Given a matrix of size $n \times m$, Find the largest submatrix of size $i \times j$ such that the sum over rows equals sum over columns and the total sum is less that $n + m$.

How I solved.

2D Array + DP
Direction vectors

Verdict

Reject