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Google system design interview prep

Scale, clarity of thought and quantified trade-offs.

Start the Interview Ready roadmap

Hiring processes vary by role, level, team and year. This is a general outline compiled from publicly shared candidate reports and company career pages, not insider information. The practice prompts are exercises in each company's product domain, not actual interview questions.

Interview process

  1. 1

    Recruiter screen

    Background, role fit and logistics.

  2. 2

    Technical phone screens

    Usually coding and problem solving over video.

  3. 3

    Onsite / virtual loop

    Several interviews: coding, and for experienced roles at least one system design round, plus behavioural.

  4. 4

    Hiring committee & team match

    Packets are reviewed centrally; team matching can follow.

What they tend to emphasise

Designing for very large scaleBreaking an ambiguous problem into partsBack-of-envelope estimationConsistency vs availability trade-offsClean, simple abstractions

Practice prompts

  • Design a web crawler that fetches billions of pages.
  • Design real-time collaborative document editing.
  • Design a globally distributed key-value store.
  • Design a video streaming service with adaptive bitrate.
  • Design a system that serves search autocomplete suggestions.

Resources

Learning paths & practice

Community experiences (0)

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