Walk me through one of your most recent projects.

"It felt pretty classic Google. I had a phone screen with behavioral and coding, then an onsite with two coding rounds and one system design round. The technical side was straightforward and very standard, and the two coding problems I remember were shortest path in a DAG and minimum meeting rooms. For system design, they had me design a news feed and then pushed on scale, fanout, storage, and ranking. Nothing about the loop felt unusual."

"Prepared a concise self-introduction and walked through a major project from my experience that is highly relevant to the role. For the questions what are you most excited currently? my answer is too general and can be more specific."

"What surprised me most was how much the process emphasized solving several coding questions under pressure. I had an initial recruiter screen, then a 45-minute pre-screen with a senior manager about my past work and impact, and after that a full loop of five interviews. The loop was two coding rounds, one of them classic LeetCode-style and one of them AI coding with data-processing and math-heavy prompts like sparse matrix times vector multiplication and k-nearest neighbor search, plus two design rounds and one behavioral. The design interviews were split between an ML modeling discussion for a computer vision problem and a system design round on something like Google Street View, which I found pretty challenging. I passed the loop, got notified that I made it through, and then moved into offer negotiation."

"I had a first product design screening round, then went into the full loop, which included coding, another product design, a project retro, and a people management round. The process felt very self-led, especially in the technical rounds, where they gave me a board or editor and expected me to drive the discussion without much prompting. I was told that many engineering manager candidates tend to score higher on the technical side and lower on the management side, but in my case, it was the opposite. I failed the coding round and the full-loop product design round, which really surprised me, since I felt I had answered the product design interview more comprehensively than the screening one. I actually came out of the interviews feeling quite confident I would get an offer, but did not."

"The interviews were more focused on my past projects and process related to roadmap, team interactions and metrics. Had some questions related to stakeholder management and Program Management skills."