Google Software Engineer Interview Questions and Answers for Experienced

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: On-site interview (5 hours).

4 back-to-back 45-minute coding interviews, followed by a design interview, with a lunch break with a Googler in the middle.

The first coding interview was a set of (surprisingly) trivial (no algorithms needed) incremental coding questions.

The two next coding interviews were problems straight from the "Cracking the coding interview" book. Even though I divulged that I'd solved pretty much exactly the same problem before, they didn't give me an alternative problem and I quickly coded up a general and optimal solution for the problems. Follow-up in-depth questions were minimal and not hard.

The last coding question was a pure algorithm question related to search trees/tries. No coding required, spent the whole time reasoning about the most effective algorithm. This was a bit of a brain twister.

The design question was related to high-level system design (not OO design) for storage and search in geographic data. Focus was effective search as well as scalability both in traffic and data volumes.

Tips: Read "Cracking the coding interview" or other similar literature. Solve all the problems and you should be good to go. If you solve a bunch of problems at HackerRank (or similar) as well, you'll have the added bonus of training on how to generalize the algorithms.