Google 2026 New Grad Canada: Three Easy R1 Tasks and Two R2 Coding Rounds

Role: Software Engineer, New Grad
Result: Passed R2 and entered Team Match
Report time: January 2026
Application: Referral

Timeline

• Applied through Google's careers site with a referral in early October
• Completed the OA in November
• R1 on December 8
• R2 on January 16
• Learned the result by phone on January 26

R1 coding

The interviewer asked three easy tasks:

1. Convert a snake_case string to camelCase.
2. A partly remembered number-formatting task that may have inserted commas every thousand.
3. A task described only as printing “all 1000-digit numbers.”

Only the first problem has a recoverable contract. The other two lack enough input and output detail to reconstruct safely.

Practice: Convert Snake Case to Camel Case

R1 behavioral

Questions included leading a challenging project, changing a hobby, helping someone join a team, and deciding what to do when a serious bug is found immediately before release with no time to fix it.

R2 coding 1: rotated handwritten-number validation

Design an OCR-style validator that accepts only handwritten numbers from 1 through 200, then also rotates the card 180 degrees and validates again. The candidate discussed a map such as h -> 4, L -> 7, and 6 <-> 9.

The source does not define the full glyph alphabet, image or string input, complete rotation map, or exact output behavior, so no judged practice link is asserted.

R2 coding 2: request lifecycle

Implement a server class with begin and end methods and print each request's start and end times. The candidate used separate maps for start and end times.

The follow-up asked how to prioritize requests by earliest end time, leading to a min-heap discussion. Request identity, timestamp acquisition, incomplete events, duplicate events, and the exact print trigger were not preserved.