Google 2026 New Grad Timeline: Restaurant Waitlist R1 and Bay Area Onsite

Role: Software Engineer, New Grad
Result: Entered Team Match
Report time: February 2026
Application: Referral

Timeline

• September 30: applied with a referral on opening day
• November 16: received the OA; completed it November 19
• November 26: submitted transcript for the next step
• January 6: completed R1 coding and behavioral interviews
• January 8: learned R1 had passed and submitted an updated resume and transcript
• January 15: visa-status call
• February 4: completed two Bay Area onsite coding rounds
• February 24: entered Team Match

R1 coding: restaurant waitlist

The coding task was the restaurant-waitlist design problem seen in other Google reports.

Practice: Restaurant Waitlist

The candidate focused on communication: starting with brute force, analyzing complexity, explaining the optimization, confirming direction before coding, adding comments, and practicing speaking while writing.

R1 behavioral

The 45-minute behavioral session contained many questions. The candidate prepared three flexible stories rather than a separate story for every leadership principle and practiced both experience-based and hypothetical responses.

R2 onsite

One coding round used recursion, with a follow-up about stack overflow. The other used tree BFS, with a follow-up about problems caused by an excessively deep tree and how to address them.

The source does not preserve either base prompt or required output, so those two rounds cannot be linked to exact practice questions.

Before R2, the candidate also completed Google's recruiter-arranged 45-minute mock interview followed by 15 minutes of feedback.