Google New Grad R1: Rental Fleet Scheduling and Behavioral Interview

Role: Software Engineer, New Grad
Result: Passed R1
Report time: August 2026

Behavioral and resume discussion

After introductions, the interviewer asked about the candidate's resume project, why they wanted to join Google, a challenge they faced in the project, and how they resolved it.

Coding: assign rental orders to cars

Each rental order contains an order ID, pickup time, and return time. Assign every order to a car so that no two orders assigned to the same car overlap. Return the complete order list for each car, and design a Car class to organize the result.

The candidate sorted orders by pickup time and used a min-heap keyed by each car's next available time. If the earliest available car was free before the next pickup, they reused it; otherwise, they created another car.

Follow-up

What changes if the fleet is limited to at most K cars and the existing cars cannot satisfy every request?

Commenters suggested maximizing the number of accepted requests, but the candidate did not confirm that objective. The exact required behavior when an order cannot be assigned therefore remains unresolved.

Practice: Minimum Cars for Rental Requests