Google SWE Interview: Phone Screen

Interview Experience
1

Title: Google - Software Engineer (Backend) - Onsite Loop
Description:

  • Education: Masters
  • Years of Experience (YOE): 7
  • Questions Asked:
    • System Design: They asked to design something like Bitly, a scalable URL shortner service. Talked about unique key generation, db partitioning, cache for hot links etc.
    • Coding Round:
      • Sliding Window Problem:
        • Given an array of integers and a target, find the maximum sum of any subarray of size k.
        • Example 1:
          • Input: nums = [1, 4, 2, 10, 23, 3, 1, 0, 20], k = 4
          • Output: 39
          • Explanation: subarray [4, 2, 10, 23] has the maximum sum of 39
        • Example 2:
          • Input: nums = [2, 3], k = 3
          • Output: 0
          • Explanation: Not enough elements to form window of size 3, so return 0 or handle invalid input
    • Behavioral: Some usuals—tell me a time you disagreed, and how you mentored someone. Nothing surprising but you need to go deep.