Google 2025 New Grad VO: Dynamic Ranges, Wrapped Document Lines, and Swipe-Word Matching

Role: Software Engineer, New Grad
Result: Entered Team Match
Report time: November 2024

All coding rounds ended with a dry run and time/space analysis. The candidate emphasized communication and requirement clarification.

Coding 1: dynamic point-in-range queries

Design a class with insertRange and queryPoint, returning whether a point is covered by inserted ranges.

Follow-ups asked for O(1) point queries, negative points, and continuous rather than discrete ranges. The candidate discussed direct lookup for discrete points and merged intervals plus binary search for continuous ranges.

Practice: Dynamic Point-in-Range Queries

Coding 2: count wrapped document lines

Given text and page width, return how many display lines are required rather than the fully justified text.

Follow-ups added words wider than the page and explicit newline operators.

Practice: Count Lines in a Width-Limited Document

Coding 3: swipe-string matches

Given a swipe string and candidate words, return words that can be matched as subsequences of the swipe string.

The candidate first considered a trie, then stored each character's positions and used binary search to advance through every candidate.

Practice: Batched Subsequence Word Matches

Behavioral interview

Questions covered going above expectations, advocating for inclusion, noticing bias or assumptions, adapting to another work style, and incorporating user or colleague feedback.