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Google L6 (Staff) Software Engineer Interview Guide
A comprehensive guide to the Google L6 (Staff) Software Engineer interview process.
The Google L6 interview process starts with a mandatory Google Hiring Assessment (GHA), followed by a recruiter screen, then typically two technical phone screens, and finally an onsite loop of about 5 interviews covering coding, system design, role related knowledge, and a behavioral assessment (Googliness). After your interviews, a hiring committee reviews all feedback before you enter team matching, where you'll have conversations with potential teams before receiving an offer.
At L6, strong coding is assumed, but what distinguishes candidates is their ability to operate as technical leaders—making high-impact architectural decisions, driving consensus across teams, and demonstrating broad organizational influence. System design and leadership interviews carry the most weight, as they directly test the architectural judgment and scope expected of staff engineers. Failing to show these traits often results in down-leveling to L5.
Since 2020, Google has conducted most interviews virtually through Google Meet, though in 2025 Google plans to reintroduce at least one in-person interview round to counter AI tool usage during remote interviews.
Candidates who excel in coding but show only senior-level (L5) design/strategy might be offered an L5 role instead of L6.
The interview consists of 6 total rounds:
- Google Hiring Assessment (GHA)
- Recruiter Phone Screen
- Technical Phone Screen (Coding, 2 rounds)
- Onsite (Usually virtual)
- Coding (1-2 rounds, typically 2)
- System Design (1 round)
- Role Related Knowledge (RRK, 1 round)
- Googliness/Leadership Behavioral (1 round)
If you pass, you'll move onto team matching and finally, offer negotiation.
Interview Rounds
Google Hiring Assessment (GHA)
Before any live interviews begin, Google requires all candidates, including L6 staff engineers, to complete the Google Hiring Assessment (GHA). This mandatory online assessment consists of around 50 multiple-choice and Likert-scale questions that evaluate your work style, leadership tendencies, ethics, teamwork preferences, and alignment with Google's values.
The GHA is essentially a personality and situational judgment test with no coding or algorithm questions. Google uses this to filter candidates who align with their culture and identify any major misfits before investing in live interviews. You'll typically receive the GHA link after your resume is screened, and you must complete it within a set time window.
The assessment focuses on cultural fit rather than technical skills, covering areas like how you handle ambiguity, your approach to collaboration, decision-making style, and leadership philosophy. For L6 candidates, the questions may probe more deeply into leadership scenarios and your approach to driving organizational change.
You're evaluated on:
- Cultural Alignment: Demonstrates alignment with Google's core values and work style preferences
- Leadership Approach: Shows appropriate leadership tendencies and decision-making style for staff-level impact
- Collaboration Style: Exhibits effective teamwork and communication preferences
Recruiter Phone Screen
The recruiter phone screen is your first real conversation with Google. You'll spend about 30 minutes on Google Meet (even when called a "phone screen") with a technical recruiter who wants to understand your background and confirm you're a good fit for the L6 level.
Expect questions about your current role, why you're interested in Google, and what type of work excites you. The recruiter will walk through your resume, asking about specific projects or technologies you've worked with. They're making sure you have the scope of experience and staff-level responsibilities that match what Google expects from a staff-level hire—leading projects, mentoring, and influencing across teams.
The recruiter will also verify practical details like your work authorization status, salary expectations, and timeline. This is your chance to ask questions about the interview process, typical team structures, or what the role involves day to day. Most recruiters are happy to share insights about what makes candidates successful in Google's process.
You're evaluated on two main aspects:
- Role Fit & Motivation: Shows genuine interest in Google and demonstrates scope and leadership aligned with staff responsibilities
- Communication: Speaks clearly about your background and answers questions in a professional, organized way
The conversation flows naturally, but treat it seriously. Recruiters have significant influence over whether you move forward, and they often provide valuable context about what interviewers will focus on later. If you've been working at smaller companies, be ready to explain how your experience translates to the scale and complexity Google operates at.
Technical Phone Screen (Coding)
You'll have two 45 minute coding sessions over Google Meet, typically scheduled a few days apart. Each session uses Google's internal Virtual Interviewing Platform (VIP), accessed via interview.google.com, which functions like a collaborative plain text editor with basic syntax highlighting and auto-indentation. VIP supports all major programming languages including Python, Java, C++, Go, and JavaScript, but provides no code execution, auto-complete, or debugging features.
Most candidates get one medium difficulty problem per session, though if you finish quickly, expect a follow up question or a second shorter problem. You can choose any standard programming language you're comfortable with—Python, Java, and C++ are popular choices due to their versatility in algorithm problems.
The problems lean heavily toward classic algorithms and data structures. Your interviewer wants to see you recognize patterns quickly and apply the right algorithmic approach without much guidance. They're also watching how you structure your code - clean variable names, logical flow, and proper handling of edge cases all matter at the L6 level.
Your communication style during these sessions carries significant weight. Start by asking clarifying questions about input constraints, expected output format, and any edge cases the interviewer wants you to consider. Then talk through your high-level approach before coding. As you write, explain your logic so the interviewer can follow your thinking, especially when you make trade-offs or choose between different algorithms.
You're evaluated on three main aspects:
- Algorithmic Problem Solving: Efficiently analyzes problems and applies appropriate data structures and algorithms to reach optimal solutions, with consideration for scale
- Code Quality & Implementation: Writes correct, well-structured, maintainable code with proper syntax, clear logic, and staff-level polish in real time
- Communication & Technical Leadership: Explains thought process clearly, discusses trade-offs, and demonstrates the technical judgment expected of staff engineers
Onsite
Coding Interviews (2 rounds)
The onsite coding rounds (typically 2, occasionally 1) use the same VIP platform as phone screens. At L6, evaluators are paying close attention to whether you demonstrate the level of polish and clarity expected from someone who regularly reviews and sets coding standards for others.
Each 45 minute session typically gives you one challenging problem, though occasionally you might get a follow up if you finish early. The interviewers expect you to move through these harder problems with the same efficiency you showed in the phone screens, but now they're watching more carefully for the staff level thinking that distinguishes L6 candidates. Your approach to breaking down complex problems, the elegance of your solution, and how you handle the additional constraints they throw at you all factor into their evaluation.
You're evaluated on:
- Complex Problem Solving: Tackles algorithmic challenges effectively, analyzing time/space complexity
- Code Quality & Accuracy: Produces clean, correct code with good organization and naming, with minimal bugs
- Clarity & Thought Process: Communicates logic and decisions clearly under pressure
- Edge Case Awareness: Identifies corner cases and tests solutions mentally when time permits
Most successful L6 candidates solve their problems completely in both rounds, even if they need a hint or two along the way. The bar is high, but the problems are designed to be solvable within the time limit if you have solid algorithmic foundations and can stay organized under pressure.
System Design Interview (1 round)
The system design round carries enormous weight for L6 candidates because it directly tests the architectural judgment and scope expected of staff engineers. This single 60-minute interview is often the deciding factor in L6 hiring decisions. You'll design a large-scale distributed system, typically something like "design a global chat service" or "design a multi-region storage system." The interviewer wants to see you think through complex technical problems the same way you would when leading major projects that impact multiple teams at Google.
You'll work on a virtual whiteboard, shared diagramming tool, or Google Docs, sketching out your architecture while talking through your decisions. There's no coding involved, but the technical depth required is significant. Your interviewer will start with a deliberately vague prompt, then watch how you gather requirements, break down the problem, and build up a comprehensive solution. Expect them to throw curveballs once you have a basic design down, asking things like "what happens if this database goes down?" or "how would you handle 10x more traffic?"
The key differentiator at this level is your ability to proactively cover breadth and depth. Staff engineers are expected to anticipate scale, availability, latency, and evolution considerations without much prompting. You'll be evaluated not just on the architecture you propose, but on how you identify requirements, clarify trade-offs, and reason about long-term implications.
Google interviewers often prefer that you avoid relying on specific, pre-built products like certain databases or proprietary cloud services. Instead, they want to see your understanding of how these components work at a fundamental level. This approach ensures you have strong foundational knowledge to build systems from the ground up, even if in practice you'd use existing products for efficiency.
At L6, the bar in system design is notably higher than L5. You must address staff-level design aspects including global scale (millions of users or QPS), multi-datacenter availability, partitioning and replication strategies, consistency models, fault tolerance, security, and strategic thinking about future growth and maintainability.
You're evaluated on three main aspects:
- Architectural Design Skills: Proposes sound high-level architectures for complex, large-scale distributed systems, correctly identifying key components and addressing staff-level scalability requirements
- Trade-offs & Deep Technical Knowledge: Demonstrates comprehensive understanding of distributed systems trade-offs (CAP theorem, consistency vs. availability, cost considerations) and can drill down into details like partitioning, failure handling, and system evolution
- Strategic Thinking & Communication: Frames problems clearly, proactively covers both breadth and depth, demonstrates forward-thinking about system evolution, and explains reasoning with the clarity expected of technical leaders
Live, up-to-date
Most commonly asked System Design questions
Staff
Googliness/Leadership Behavioral Interview (1 round)
The behavioral round is often the deciding factor for L6 and remains a formal evaluation dimension in Google's hiring process. This 45-minute interview is sometimes called just "behavioral" or "leadership" externally, but internally Google still explicitly evaluates candidates on "Googliness"—alignment with Google's core values and culture—alongside leadership capabilities.
Your interviewer will ask both behavioral questions ("Tell me about a time when...") about past experiences and situational questions ("How would you...") about hypothetical scenarios. Google uses this mix to evaluate both your proven track record and your thought process for novel situations. They're not looking for perfect scenarios where everything went smoothly. Google specifically values stories where things went wrong and you learned something meaningful from the experience.
At the staff level, the emphasis is on technical leadership and influence without authority. Interviewers want to hear stories that show how you've mentored others, built consensus across organizations, and driven outcomes that had impact beyond your immediate team.
The conversation flows naturally, but your interviewer is carefully noting how you describe your role in team dynamics. They're particularly interested in times you've mentored junior engineers, influenced technical decisions across teams, or stepped up during critical moments. Since L6s are expected to lead projects that span multiple teams, they want evidence you can build consensus and drive outcomes without formal authority.
Google continues to formally rate candidates on Googliness as a separate dimension during hiring committee review.
You're evaluated on three main aspects:
- Technical Leadership & Initiative: Provides strong examples of leading multi-team technical efforts, influencing without authority, driving architectural decisions, and mentoring engineers at scale
- Collaboration & Influence: Demonstrates ability to build consensus across organizations, resolve complex conflicts, and communicate effectively with diverse stakeholders including senior leadership
- Googliness (Culture Fit): Exhibits comfort with ambiguity, bias for action, collaborative mindset, humility, adaptability, learning from failure, and strong user focus—all while maintaining the strategic perspective expected of staff engineers
Role Related Knowledge (RRK) Interview (1 round)
The RRK round is now a standard component of the L6 interview loop, not optional. This is a deep dive into your domain expertise and architectural judgment tailored to the specific role and your background. You'll spend 45–60 minutes with a senior engineer or hiring manager discussing technical decisions you've made in past projects, trade-offs you considered, and how you'd approach complex scenarios that require deep expertise in your specialty area.
The RRK content varies widely by role. For general backend SWE roles, you might discuss architecture decisions, scaling systems, performance tuning, reliability, security, or tooling choices. Android candidates might focus on app architecture patterns, lifecycle management, or mobile-specific performance optimization. ML candidates could face questions about training pipelines, model deployment, or data quality in production. The format can even substitute for other interview types—for example, ML roles might have two ML-focused design discussions instead of a generic system design question.
Your interviewer is usually someone who works in your domain daily, so surface-level answers won't fly. Expect them to press on details—why you chose one design over another, how you validated performance, or what you would have done differently. The evaluation here is about technical depth and judgment at scale.
You're evaluated on three main aspects:
- Domain Expertise: Demonstrates comprehensive knowledge of relevant frameworks, tools, and systems, with deep understanding of internals, trade-offs, and best practices in your specialty
- Applied Experience & Impact: Draws upon past projects to provide concrete examples of technical decisions, lessons learned, and measurable impact at scale, showing progression toward staff-level scope
- Technical Judgment: Applies specialized knowledge to new scenarios with the depth, reasoning, and strategic thinking expected of a staff engineer who will influence technical direction
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