Senior SDE Interview Questions at Google

Published July 22, 2026 · Updated July 22, 2026

5 real Senior SDE interview questions asked at Google. Covers System Design, Technical, HR rounds. Sourced from engineers who cleared the loop.

5 questions
318 upvotes
Rounds: 3
Top topic: system-design

Interview Signals — What Google Asks Senior SDEs

Frequently Asked Topics
system-design3x
react1x
behavioral1x
Interview Rounds
System Design3q
Technical1q
HR1q
Experience Level
5–8 Years1q
4-7 years1q
3-6 years1q
2-6 years1q

All Senior SDE Questions Asked at Google

Google Hard System Design round 5–8 YearsSystem DesignDistributed Systems

Design a URL shortening service (like bit.ly) that handles 1 billion shortened URLs and 100K redirects per second.

↑ 134 upvotes · 107 engineers asked this · Senior SDE
Google Hard System Design round 4-7 yearsSystem DesignDistributed Systems

Design an autocomplete/typeahead system for a search engine handling 100K queries per second. Discuss the trie-based approach, how you would rank suggestions, and how you would keep the trie updated with trending queries without hurting read latency.

↑ 61 upvotes · 24 engineers asked this · Senior SDE
Google Medium HR round 2-6 years

Tell me about a time your code caused a production incident. What was your immediate response, and what did you change afterward so it wouldn't happen again?

↑ 44 upvotes · 27 engineers asked this · Senior SDE
Google Hard System Design round 4-8 yearsSystem DesignDistributed Systems

Design a URL shortener that must handle 100M new URLs per day and 10x that in reads. Walk through your ID generation strategy and why a simple auto-increment counter breaks at this scale.

↑ 41 upvotes · 22 engineers asked this · Senior SDE
Google Medium Technical round 3-6 yearsReactJavaScript

Explain the difference between reconciliation and the commit phase in React. Why can render be interrupted in Concurrent Mode but commit cannot?

↑ 38 upvotes · 15 engineers asked this · Senior SDE

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More at Google

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Frequently asked questions

What topics does Google ask Senior SDEs?
Common topics: system-design, react, behavioral.
What rounds are there in Google Senior SDE interview?
Reported rounds: System Design, Technical, HR.
What experience level does Google hire Senior SDEs at?
Most reported experience: 5–8 Years.