Google New Grad R1: Reachability Through Scheduled Flights and BQ

Role: Software Engineer, New Grad
Result: Advanced after R1
Report time: March 2026

Coding: flight reachability

Each flight contains an origin airport, destination airport, departure time, and arrival time. Given a starting airport and target airport, determine whether the target is reachable.

The candidate modeled airports and flights as a graph and used BFS or DFS. The interviewer spent substantial time on clarification, data-structure design, and implementation details, leaving about 15 minutes for coding. The candidate still completed the code and time-complexity analysis.

The source does not clarify whether a connection must depart after the previous flight arrives, whether the first departure has a lower time bound, or whether the times are incidental fields.

Practice: Reach a Destination Through Scheduled Flights

Behavioral interview

Questions included:

• A dispute over credit
• What the candidate wanted to work on at Google
• What helps them maintain strong motivation at work
• A project whose plan changed and how they handled it

The rest of the session included informal conversation about games and past experiences. The candidate felt the interview was only average but later reported moving forward.