Google New Grad Bay Area Onsite: Shift-Equivalent Strings and Restaurant Waitlist

Role: Software Engineer, New Grad
Result: Entered Team Match and later joined Google
Onsite date: February 10, 2026
Location: Bay Area

The candidate checked in at the front desk, wore a visitor badge, and used computers provided in the interview rooms. The two interviewers arrived in sequence for back-to-back coding rounds.

Coding round 1: shift-equivalent strings

Given an array of strings, group strings by the relative distance between adjacent characters. For example, abc and bcd share the same pattern.

The candidate used a map from a distance signature to each group. Edge cases included alphabet wraparound, handled with modulo arithmetic.

Near the end, the interviewer said the input was not limited to lowercase. The source does not define a mixed-case alphabet, ordering, case-folding rule, or wrap semantics. The candidate later thought about modulo 52, but that was not an interviewer-confirmed contract.

Practice: Group Shift-Equivalent Strings

Coding round 2: restaurant waitlist

Implement a restaurant waitlist with add and table-allocation operations.

The candidate used a map, deque, and set. The follow-up allowed a table to take the earliest-arriving party among all eligible party sizes at or below the table capacity rather than only an exact size match. The interviewer said a direct O(n) scan was acceptable.

Practice: Restaurant Waitlist

The candidate initially felt the first round had gone poorly because of small implementation mistakes. Google later requested supporting documents, and the candidate entered Team Match on February 24. A later update from an alternate account said they had been working at YouTube for three months.