Google L3 Software Engineer — referral to offer

## How I applied
I was referred after reaching out on **LinkedIn** and sharing my resume.

## Timeline
1. Recruiter call — role, background, logistics
2. Technical phone screen (DSA)
3. Onsite loop — 3 DSA rounds
4. Googliness (behavioural / culture fit)

## Round-by-round

### 1. Recruiter call
Unexpectedly technical for an intro call — complexity of Bubble Sort and how heap operations work at a high level. Don't treat this as a pure logistics call; keep fundamentals warm from day one.

### 2. Technical phone screen
A **graph** problem. Not the hardest of the loop, but clearly designed to filter anyone without solid traversal basics.

### 3. Onsite 1 — Strings
String manipulation. The interviewer mostly watched how cleanly I handled edge cases while parsing/transforming.

### 4. Onsite 2 — Optimisation (Bucket Sort)
The toughest round for me. I first solved it with **heaps** at O(n log n); the interviewer kept pushing for better. Thinking out loud, I reached a **bucket sort** solution — constant time for this specific problem. Really a test of how far you can optimise a working solution under pressure.

### 5. Onsite 3 — Range queries
Hardest round of the loop: range queries on an array, with a follow-up that needed **binary search** to make querying efficient.

### 6. Googliness
A conversation rather than an interrogation — background, deep dive into projects and my exact contribution, and why Google specifically.

## Verdict
**Selected for L3.**