Google DS & Algo Round Interview Questions

Google has one of the toughest DS & Algo rounds in the industry. DSA rounds are there for both frontend and backend roles.

DP, Graph, and Line Sweep are important topics.

Google's interview codebase is very large, with questions of all difficulty levels (from super easy to super hard). One question can be a medium question with a couple of follow-ups for optimizations, or it can be just one hard question. It all depends on which question the interviewer chooses.

There are two common things about candidates who clear Google interviews and whose overall process is smooth.

1. At least 2 "Strong-Hire" votes and no "No-Hire" in the on-site packet.
2. Candidates who narrated trade-offs and edge cases, and correctly answered counter questions, got bumped from "Hire" to "Strong Hire" even with small bugs.

Point 2 is also valid for other top tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, etc.

Interviewers are given explicit instructions to treat the phone-screen interview as just a normal interview and give ratings as:

• SH = Strong Hire
• H = Hire
• LH = Lean Hire
• LNH = Lean No-Hire
• NH = No-Hire
• SNH = Strong No-Hire

If the question's difficulty level is hard, then SH, H, LH, and LNH are considered passed.

Otherwise, SH, H, and LH are considered passed.

I created this list from people posting their experiences on forums, blogs, etc.

Below are the questions which you can directly find on LeetCode.

• https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-window-substring/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/meeting-rooms-iii/description
• https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-duplicate-substring/description
• https://leetcode.com/problems/decode-string/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/decode-ways/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/path-with-minimum-effort/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/course-schedule-ii/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/sum-of-distances-in-tree/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/course-schedule/description
• https://leetcode.com/problems/house-robber/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/special-array-ii/description
• https://leetcode.com/problems/lowest-common-ancestor-of-a-binary-tree/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/guess-the-word/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/first-bad-version/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/partition-equal-subset-sum/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/number-of-visible-people-in-a-queue/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/find-if-path-exists-in-graph/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/permutation-sequence/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/positions-of-large-groups/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/find-first-and-last-position-of-element-in-sorted-array/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/expressive-words/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/top-k-frequent-elements/description/
• https://leetcode.com/problems/happy-number/description/