Google L4 PhD New Grad Timeline: Inequality Consistency, DAG Counts, and Team Match

Role: Software Engineer, L4 PhD New Grad
Result: Entered Team Match
Report time: April 2025
Application: Referral

Timeline

• October 2024: applied with a referral
• Mid-November: phone screen
• January 2025: learned the phone screen had passed after following up on two months of silence
• Mid-March: mock interview
• Late March / early April: four interview rounds
• Four days later: entered Team Match

Phone screen: inequality consistency

Given constraints such as a < b and c > b, determine whether all inequalities can be satisfied without contradiction.

The follow-up added non-strict operators such as <= and >=.

Practice: Check Inequality Constraint Consistency

Onsite coding: DAG ancestor and descendant counts

For every node in a DAG, return how many ancestors and descendants it has. The candidate used DFS for descendants, reversed the graph, and used DFS again for ancestors.

Practice: Ancestor and Descendant Counts in a DAG

Two other rounds were described only as modifications of encoded problem numbers, without the actual modifications, so they are not reconstructed.

Team Match

Within about one week, the candidate spoke with three Google Cloud teams. Hiring-manager calls included a senior director and technical lead. The candidate ranked the teams afterward and matched with the top preference after the weekend.