Google SWE Internship interview questions

Round 1 — Recruiter Call (20 min) - Brief intro about the company and team - Asked about my experience with microservices and Spring Boot - Discussed visa/relocation logistics - Shared salary band upfront Vibe: Friendly and transparent --- Round 2 — Take-Home Assignment (3 days) - Build a small REST API for a payment gateway - Requirements: - Support multiple payment providers (Mada, Visa, Apple Pay) - Implement retry logic for failed transactions - Write unit and integration tests - Use Spring Boot + PostgreSQL - Submitted via GitHub repo with a README Difficulty: Medium — straightforward but time-consuming --- Round 3 — Code Review & Deep Dive (60 min) Interviewer: Tech Lead - Walked through my take-home submission - Asked why I chose Factory Pattern over Strategy for payment routing - Discussed trade-offs of eager vs lazy loading in JPA - Asked me to refactor one method live to improve error handling - Questions about transaction isolation levels and deadlock prevention Difficulty: Medium-Hard --- Round 4 — System Design (45 min) Interviewer: Principal Engineer - Design a real-time transaction monitoring system - Covered: - Event-driven architecture with Kafka - Fraud detection pipeline - Database partitioning for high-volume writes - Alerting and dashboarding - Follow-up: "How would you handle 10x traffic during a flash sale?" Difficulty: Hard --- Round 5 — Culture Fit (30 min) Interviewer: Engineering Director - "Describe a time you shipped something you weren't proud of" - "How do you prioritize when everything is urgent?" - "What does a healthy engineering culture look like to you?" - Asked about my long-term career goals Difficulty: Easy --- Offer & Negotiation - Received offer 4 days after final round - Base + housing allowance + annual flight home - Negotiated a signing bonus — they agreed without pushback

DSA tree and graph question and then array/hashing. Was able to breeze through array one had slight difficult for tree and graph question but the interviewer provided a crucial hint. All was good.