Inside the interview: as Google marks its 20th year in Brazil, São Paulo engineering Director and site lead Alex shares his interview advice

This post is part of Google’s “Inside the Interview” series, where current Google employees share their stories about interviewing for Google. Because our hiring process is constantly evolving, the experiences below may not fully reflect what the current interview process looks like.

About me

As I cross my 2 year mark at Google, I was invited to share how I got here. I’m the Site lead for our growing Engineering Hub in São Paulo, as well as the Director for the Content Safety Platform, an internal horizontal platform that helps make people safer on the internet everyday, detecting and avoiding spam, phishing, and other abusive content. 

In these roles I’ve seen how important it is for candidates to prepare for interviews so they can convey their experience and skills. So I hope the story of my interview process helps people realize their dream of working in Google engineering.

Getting the interview

In May 2022 I was skeptical of taking the call with a recruiter that reached out to me about a new opportunity “I could not miss.” They did not tell me the company they were recruiting for, and I was happy in my previous role as Chief Technology Officer at a São Paulo-based health tech company, leading a great team through very interesting business and technology challenges.

But this was also a period of growing uncertainty in the industry, so I thought it would be good to know what the market had to offer.

When they mentioned big tech and a new office my heart skipped a beat. When I learned it was Google expanding their presence in Brazil I knew it was an opportunity of a lifetime. I'm originally from São Paulo and owe much of my education to the University of São Paulo, so when the recruiter told me this position was for leading the growth of our engineering presence here, in a new Engineering center that would be built as part of a partnership with Instituto de Pesquisas Tecnológicas in the USP campus, I couldn't avoid that sense of excitement that comes from knowing an opportunity is going to advance your life's mission.

So off I went back to the study room, knowing I had to be well prepared to live up to this amazing chance of joining in such a significant role.

Preparing for the interview

Luckily, before joining the health tech company I had gone through a hard process of studying for technical interviews. This included: help from a career coach, many hours clocked of coding exercises, rehearsing telling stories from my experience that demonstrated skills like strategic thinking and execution, setting and achieving ambitious business goals, leading teams through change, dealing with conflict, growing people and teams, and performance management. They also demonstrated the hard technical issues where I helped design, develop, test and launch systems that were reliable at scale.

It had been a little more than a year since I ran through dozens and dozens of interviews, so I wasn't that rusty. I had learned a lot when I failed some of them, even though I knew I had the skills and abilities for the jobs. 

It's one thing to do well on the job, it's another to be able to reliably and quickly demonstrate that success in a short period of time in an interview.

So I dusted off some books and websites. I like learning by reading books so I picked up and revisited some of the foundational classics in my library on topics like programming and leadership. As for content on the web, when I could, I would sneak in a video or blog posts of coding exercises or architecture designs.

I spent about 3-4 hours every week for a month, at night after work, going through these things, and then interviews started.

The interviews

I had an interview with a Senior Director focused on how to build great teams and lead them through moonshot objectives or challenges. Memorizing my preferred stories to illustrate points I knew would come up helped a lot with this interview. It also helped for me to ask good questions. Interviewers appreciate when the candidate shows interest in their work, and validate the opportunity and the company as well.

My interview with a Principal Engineer focused on my experience with large scale, distributed systems. Although my biggest scale at the time was almost a hundred million users (orders of magnitude less than what Google has to handle), the same techniques and engineering practices apply. I talked about constraints considered, trade-offs and my approach to decisions to show that I had the technical knowledge and skills to support engineers in my team. At one point the interviewer asked me if I had considered another solution to a problem I was describing, and came up, on the spot, with a simple answer that was elusive. I was really impressed by the caliber of talent at Google from that one interaction. Fortunately my team had already discussed and discarded that same idea, so I could help him learn something from our experience about certain cases the interviewer had not considered.

My interview with a Senior Product Director was really interesting. I had come prepared with two stories of when the product team had been right and the engineering team had to change priorities or solutions, to show that I was a good stakeholder. But I was caught off guard when he asked me about managing technical debt. I was worried now because I did not want to seem like my points were technical gold plating against product priorities, but then I was happily surprised that this Director wanted to help his teams carve out time to pay said debt!

 I also had two other management interviews focused on Director responsibilities, work-style and communication, with my hiring manager and would-be boss, and with the VP of our area. For these interviews, I felt the most value I added were the hard questions I was bringing to them about their current business priorities, constraints and challenges. I had done some work investigating the area and press articles related to it, that gave me a distant glimpse of what the work encompassed. Remember that you're also interviewing your future boss and if he walks away excited because of being productively challenged, you've given a glimpse of how great it will be to work with you for real. Bonus points if you ask about the biggest issues and suggest an alternative or strategy these folks hadn't thought of before, you're adding value early in the process! 

It’s worth noting that today — as an interviewer and manager — my questions to candidates are often based on real issues I'm dealing with in my day-to-day. I always go into the interviews in hope I can learn something or have a new insight. 

Finally, I had my systems design interview. Having failed a few of these in the past I walked in feeling tense. When I realized my interviewer was Professor Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, the person who founded the company that Google acquired to start their presence in Brazil, and renowned expert in information retrieval (he wrote the reference book in Portuguese), that tense feeling transformed into terror. I even called up a few friends I knew had worked with him to get tips on how he was. 

I have to say Berthier did a great job leading the interview and making me feel safe. He gave me time to think and ask all the questions I needed. A tip here: if you are not asking questions about the constraints and requirements in a system design interview you will fail. I also appreciated that Berthier didn't mind going a bit over time so I could finish all the important parts of the design. It was a very complete and thorough interview. We covered high level system components, how they should be deployed in infrastructure for the reliability and scale he needed, and went deep into some components, specifying what algorithms (thanks to my former Google friend from college for reminding me to read the map reduce paper before the interviews) and data structures we would use it in critical parts of the system (it was a hashtable, but I had to know how to implement one from scratch too).

After the interview

I walked out of that last one sweating, it was really challenging. 

And then I waited. 

At one point in my wait after almost 2 months I told myself I hadn't made it and kinda convinced myself to just focus on the present….  so I was ecstatic and full of joy when I eventually heard I was moving on to the offer stage. 

This was also before our careers site now included the option to create a profile, through which you’ll get a notice when there’s any status change to your application.

I had a couple more calls, at this stage to better understand the team and details of the offer and benefits. Things moved fast again and in another month I was starting with the team.

The last thing I'll say is just how great my first few weeks were. Google is an amazing company, the onboarding program is really well structured and you have time to learn how the company works. 

The team welcomed me with warmth, kindness and understanding. That was really important because I had a lot to learn and impostor syndrome kicks in for everyone, no matter how senior or experienced you are. When you join a company with brilliant people that know a lot more than you about their work, it's bound to happen. 

I’m grateful to the engineers who smiled at me and showed me where we could get breakfast on my first day in the São Paulo office. And I’m really thankful to the team for taking me to dinner on my very first night visiting Belo Horizonte. Those small gestures made a huge difference for me.

Final piece of advice

Even if you're senior, take the time to study and practice interviewing. It will make a big difference!