Google Web Solution Engineer Interview Experience

My journey with Google began when a recruiter reached out to me via LinkedIn. After an initial application, I had a conversation with the recruiter who provided details about the role and posed a few fundamental computer science and web tech questions, touching upon HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and data structures & algorithms. Following this introductory round, I was informed that I would be moving forward to the next stage, and the overall interview process was thoroughly explained.

In my main technical round, which covered DSA, problem-solving, and web tech, I was challenged to design a Product Inventory System. The core requirement was that each seller could submit an order with a price and timestamp, and the system needed to efficiently support a getMinPrice() API to retrieve the order with the lowest price. I proposed a min-heap-based approach for this. A follow-up question required supporting the removal of orders by sellers at any time. I addressed this by suggesting lazy deletion to avoid the overhead of immediate heap updates. We also delved into time complexity trade-offs and explored potential optimizations, including the use of a self-balancing binary search tree, similar to Java's TreeMap, for more efficient removals and better order management. Despite arriving at an optimal solution and clearly articulating my design choices and their trade-offs, the outcome was a lean no-hire.