Google New Grad Data Engineer Phone Screen: Restaurant Waitlist System

Role: Data Engineer, New Grad
Result: Ghosted after the phone screen
Report time: April 2024

Coding and design: restaurant waitlist

Design a restaurant waitlist supporting three capabilities:

1. Add a new party to the list.
2. Remove any waiting party when they no longer want to wait.
3. When a table becomes available, select the next party to seat.

The matching policy was deliberately flexible. The candidate could require an exact capacity match or allow any party whose size was less than or equal to the table capacity.

The candidate implemented an O(n) solution and proposed an O(1) approach. They emphasized that this felt more open-ended than a standard LeetCode prompt.

Practice: Restaurant Waitlist

The interviewer was friendly and spent a long time answering the candidate's questions after coding. The candidate never received a formal decision and believed the process had ended. In a follow-up, they said they later learned this was an older Google problem and confirmed that it did not correspond to a standard LeetCode question.