Google Interview Prep Guide
Machine Learning Software Engineer
What’s a Machine Learning Software Engineer (SWE)?
Machine Learning Engineers at Google develop the next-generation technologies that change
how millions of users connect, explore and interact with information and one another. Google
believes the impact of AI will be most powerful when everyone can use it. As a Machine
Learning SWE, you will specialize in supervised/unsupervised learning and apply techniques to
various problems that scale to millions of users.
Why Google? Impact.
Google is and always will be an engineering company. We hire people with a broad set of
technical skills who are ready to tackle some of technology's greatest challenges and make an
impact on billions of users. At Google, engineers not only revolutionize search, they routinely
work on massive scalability and storage solutions, large-scale applications and develop entirely
new platforms around the world. From Assistant to Ads, Chrome to CloudAI, Tensorflow to
Search, YouTube to Maps, Google Engineers are changing the world one technological
achievement after another.
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General Interview Tips
Explain - We want to understand how you think, so explain your thought process and decision
making throughout the interview. Remember we’re not only evaluating your technical ability,
but also how you solve problems. Explicitly state and check assumptions with your interviewer
to ensure they are reasonable.
Clarify - Many questions will be deliberately open-ended to provide insight into what
categories and information you value within the technological puzzle. We’re looking to see how
you engage with the problem and your primary method for solving it. Be sure to talk through
your thought process and feel free to ask specific questions if you need clarification.
Improve - Think about ways to improve the solution you present. It’s worthwhile to think out
loud about your initial thoughts to a question. In many cases, your first answer may need some
refining and further explanation. If necessary, start with the brute force solution and improve
on it — just let the interviewer know that's what you're doing and why.
Practice - You won’t have access to an IDE or compiler during the interview so practice writing
code on paper or a whiteboard. Be sure to test your code and ensure it’s easily readable
without bugs. Don’t stress about small syntactical errors like which substring to use for a given
method (e.g. start, end or start, length) — just pick one and let your interviewer know.
The Technical Phone Interviews
Your phone interview will cover data structures and algorithms. Be prepared to write around
20-30 lines of code in your strongest language. Approach all scripting as a coding exercise —
this should be clean, rich, robust code.
1. You will be asked an open-ended question. Ask clarifying questions, devise
requirements.
2. You will be asked to explain it in an algorithm.
3. Convert it to a workable code. Hint: Don't worry about getting it perfect because time is
limited. Write what comes but then refine it later. Also make sure you consider corner
cases and edge cases, production ready.
4. Optimize the code, follow it with test cases and find any bugs.
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The Programming & Algorithm Interviews
Programming - You should know at least one programming language really well, preferably
C++, Java, Python, Go, or C. You will be expected to know APIs, Object Oriented Design and
Programming, how to test your code, as well as come up with corner cases and edge cases for
code. Note that we focus on conceptual understanding rather than memorization.
Practice solving the coding problems yourself, entering them into a compiler to verify your
solutions work and are bug-free. Remember: you won’t have the benefit of using a compiler in
your interview, so it’s important to keep practicing until you can solve problems (bug-free!).
Algorithms - Approach the problem with both bottom-up and top-down algorithms. You will
be expected to know the complexity of an algorithm and how you can improve/change it.
Algorithms that are used to solve Google problems include sorting (plus searching and binary
search), divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming/memoization, greediness, recursion or
algorithms linked to a specific data structure. Know Big-O notations (e.g. run time) and be
ready to discuss complex algorithms like Dijkstra and A*. We recommend discussing or
outlining the algorithm you have in mind before writing code.
Sorting - Be familiar with common sorting functions and on what kind of input data they’re
efficient on or not. Think about efficiency means in terms of runtime and space used. For
example, in exceptional cases insertion-sort or radix-sort are much better than the generic
QuickSort/MergeSort/HeapSort answers.
Data structures - You should study up on as many data structures as possible. Data structures
most frequently used are arrays, linked lists, stacks, queues, hash-sets, hash-maps,
hash-tables, dictionary, trees and binary trees, heaps and graphs. You should know the data
structure inside out, and what algorithms tend to go along with each data structure.
Mathematics - Some interviewers ask basic discrete math questions. This is more prevalent at
Google than at other companies because counting problems, probability problems and other
Discrete Math 101 situations surround us. Spend some time before the interview refreshing
your memory on (or teaching yourself) the essentials of elementary probability theory and
combinatorics. You should be familiar with n-choose-k problems and their ilk.
Graphs - Consider if a problem can be applied with graph algorithms like distance, search,
connectivity, cycle-detection, etc. There are three basic ways to represent a graph in memory
(objects and pointers, matrix, and adjacency list) — familiarize yourself with each
representation and its pros and cons. You should know the basic graph traversal algorithms,
breadth-first search and depth-first search. Know their computational complexity, their
tradeoffs and how to implement them in real code.
Recursion - Many coding problems involve thinking recursively and potentially coding a
recursive solution. Use recursion to find more elegant solutions to problems that can be solved
iteratively.
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Machine Learning Technical Prep
At least one interview will be focused on your expertise within Machine Learning. Please work
directly with your recruiter to understand the panel of interview topics. General knowledge of
the field and its main concepts should be demonstrated throughout the interview, such as
supervised learning, unsupervised learning, overfitting, boosting, regularization. Experience
with common learning algorithms such as logistic regression, decision trees, PCA, k-means and
understanding/practice of how to apply those techniques to various problems is important.
Think about solutions that can scale. Practice mapping algorithms to one or more Machine
Learning paradigms and tuning/training them. Make sure you are able to analyze data and
realize patterns in them to support solutions.
The interview will focus on these main areas:
● Theoretical ML concepts and practical applications including problem definition, model
selection, model tuning, and evaluation.
● Industry-Scale ML including performance and cost optimization, data handling,
production-oriented experimentation & debugging.
● (Optional) Specialization knowledge based on domain expertise (e.g., Natural Language
Processing, Computer Vision, and others) as below:
● Generative AI
○ Knowledge of techniques and applications, limitations and biases in data
preparation and processing.
○ Generative AI empowers machines to create original content by learning
patterns from existing data. Knowledge of transformer models, multi-modal
large models, autoregressive models, VAEs, GANs, and diffusion models is
expected. Proficiency in prompt engineering and fine-tuning techniques and the
ability to optimize these models for specific tasks.
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● Recommendations/Ranking/Prediction
○ Experience developing software that generates suggestions based on various
input and output targets, ex. book or movie recommendations based on
previous selections.
● Computer Vision
○ Knowledge of methods for acquiring, processing, analyzing, and understanding
images and, in general, high-dimensional data from the real world in order to
produce numerical or symbolic information. Familiarity with one or several
sub-domains: tracking, pose estimation, compression, etc…
● Natural Language Processing
● Knowledge and experience about processing/understanding natural language
including main concepts like word embeddings, parse trees, parts of speech and
the main tools like LSTM, attention, bidirectional models, beam search. Also
understand the pros and cons of Machine Learning approaches compared to
more classical approaches like ngram models.
Design*
In this interview, you should be able to combine your current Machine Learning knowledge,
theories, experience and judgment toward solving a real-world engineering problem.
Questions are generally open ended so you can dive deeper into the solution. It is important to
design a solution thinking about data analysis, potential use cases, the users, scalability,
limitations and tradeoffs.
ML design interviews may cover the following concepts:
● Machine Learning Fundamentals: Types of ML, algorithms, model evaluation, feature
engineering.
● System Design for ML: Data pipelines, model training, model deployment, scalability.
● Software Engineering Best Practices for ML: Code modularity, testing, version
control, CI/CD, monitoring and logging.
● Additional Considerations: Problem understanding, communication, collaboration,
and overall ML domain knowledge.
Example of ML design question you can expect:
● Design a near-duplicate image detection system
● Design a recommendation system for a music streaming platform
The ML design question will be tailored to your area of expertise
*ML design design interviews are not part of new graduate candidates’ interview processes. Unsure if this applies to you? Ask your
recruiter.
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Interviewing @ Google
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