A total of five interviews: two coding rounds, one system design interview, and two behavioral interviews.

System Design Interview:

During this interview, I was tasked with designing a high-scale nearby friends and place system (proximity server). I initiated by outlining the requirements, defining APIs, and providing a high-level design. However, the interviewer expressed a specific interest in understanding how the search functionality would operate. They explicitly mentioned that they were not concerned with onboarding and other implementation details. Our discussion delved deep into topics like data storage for nearby places/friends, scalability considerations, ensuring 100% availability, and cost optimization. This interview was particularly positive, as it encouraged an in-depth exploration of core design challenges rather than adhering strictly to the traditional system design format.

1st Coding Interview:

1. Finding the Lowest Common Ancestor (LCA) in a tree with only parent references provided. Given a list of nodes, each with a parent reference, the task was to find the LCA for a given pair of nodes. I carefully considered corner cases, including scenarios when the nodes were the same, not in the list, and more.
2. Merging three sorted arrays while removing duplicates. The challenge was to merge these arrays, each containing potentially duplicate items, into one array with duplicates removed. The interviewer sought an optimal solution, so I articulated my thought process and ran several test cases before writing a single line of code.

2nd Coding Interview:

1. Calculating the Maximum Sum in an n-tree. The goal was to include only the current node and its child nodes when calculating the maximum sum. I proactively clarified whether the interviewer wanted the k maximum values, so I proceeded to write code for finding k maximum values directly.
2. Checking for Strobogrammatic Numbers. This problem was relatively straightforward, and I was able to solve it efficiently.

1st Behavioral Interview:

This interview predominantly focused on behavioral questions and discussions related to my past projects. Topics covered included complex projects I had worked on, conflict resolution with colleagues, handling disagreements between me and my manager, and instances where I had provided feedback to peers and how I had done so.

2nd Behavioral Interview:

Similar to the first behavioral interview, this session requested different examples in response to similar questions.

Went through a full Google interview loop.

Round1: Got a directed graph traversal problem and used DFS to solve it. Had a really great conversation with my interviewer and he nodded constantly. I finished like 20 minute early and the interviewer was like: "OMG, we still have 20 minutes". I started to explain the BFS approach and in the middle the interviewer remembered a edge case and asked me how would I solve it. I stumbled a bit, he gave a hint which I clicked and solved and explained it.

The interviewer seemed happy with my approach and we had the last 10 minutes just chatting. The problem was a medium level.

Round2: Got a matrix related + trie problem. I explained my approach and started implementing it. Ten minutes into the approach the interviewer gave me a small hint which again I clicked and immediately changed a lit bit of my implementation which the interviewer seemed happy. I made some small programming joke and we both laughed.

The interviewer seemed ok with my approach and I did finish the problem. This problem was more of a hard level.

Round3: Got a sliding window problem. Had to ask a lot of clarfying question and started coding up the solution I proposed. The interviewer was quiet for most of the time. After I finished the solution he was okay with it and we moved on to a followup and I coded it out quickly and he was okay with it.

The communication was okay but I couldn't really connect with the interviewer since he was a bit quiet. This problem with the followup is a medium level problem.

Round4: Got a nested recursive problem. I gave a lot example to clarify, the interviewer was mostly quiet. I finished super early with like 15 minutes left and we started optimizing the return type of function. Last 10 minute was just chatting and it was great.

The interviewer was nice but a bit quiet. This was definitely a hard level question.

Round5: Chatted with a manager and we laughed a lot. Also of all my behavior interviews, this was the only manager that had interest in my side projects which accumluated a few hundred stars and was reported by multiple tech medias.