Google

I applied off-campus for the Google Software Engineer Intern role and was initially contacted by a recruiter after my resume was shortlisted. During the recruiter call, we discussed my projects, competitive programming experience, coding profiles and preferred programming language. Similar India-based candidates have reported questions around LeetCode/Codeforces profiles and previous projects during this stage. The technical process consisted of two DSA-focused interviews, each around 45 minutes. In the first round, I was given a problem involving trees and graphs. I started by explaining the brute-force idea, then worked towards the optimized approach. The interviewer asked me to dry-run the solution, discuss complexity and handle a few follow-up cases. I made sure to keep communicating my thought process instead of immediately jumping into code. The second round was another DSA problem, this time involving graph traversal. The interviewer focused heavily on the reasoning behind my approach and asked questions about time and space complexity. I was able to derive the optimal solution and implement it successfully. Publicly shared Google intern experiences from India similarly describe medium-to-hard DSA questions with follow-ups and little or no focus on core CS subjects. After completing both rounds, I received the offer from Google for the SWE Internship. The process was intense but very focused on problem-solving. My biggest takeaway was that solving the problem was only one part of the interview—the interviewer also paid close attention to how I approached the problem, communicated my reasoning and improved the solution.