Google·Software Engineer

Google Software Engineer interview experience

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SWE3Posted Feb 2026 · Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

My interview started with a tough phone screen question around finding the longest path in a graph.

The framing was very specific: I was asked to think in terms of starting from the leaf nodes and computing distances as I went.

The key detail was how to store results as I progressed—using a vector to hold the maximum distance for each node. As part of the reasoning, each node effectively needed to return the maximum of its children’s distances plus one, based on the longest path logic. I had to work through that recurrence under live phone-screen conditions, which made the question feel much more demanding than a typical coding exercise.

I could tell quickly that I was being evaluated on

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