Senior SWE building the ranking/pricing and user-value layer behind Google Discover Ads

This is a Senior Software Engineer role on Google Ads' Discover Ads team, owning the auction (ranking/pricing), inventory, and user-value logic that decides how many ads to show Discover feed users and how to price them. Expect a mix of core Google SWE loop (coding, data structures & algorithms, system design) plus questions probing product sense around ads ranking, A/B testing, and balancing advertiser, user, and Google value. Good fit for engineers who can talk through experimentation and information-retrieval/ranking systems, not just raw coding.

Practice this interview

Free · a live voice mock calibrated to this exact role

Start the mock interview

Likely format

Google's standard SWE loop: phone screen(s) with coding, followed by an onsite/virtual onsite of 4-5 rounds mixing coding (DS&A), system design, and Googleyness/leadership behavioral, with role-specific ads/ranking system design likely for this team.

What this interview tests

Coding: data structures & algorithms
Large-scale system design (info retrieval, ranking/recommendation systems)
A/B testing and hypothesis validation methodology
Ads auction concepts: ranking and pricing tradeoffs
Data analysis / product thinking for balancing user, advertiser, and platform value
Code review and engineering best practices

Common question themes

Design a system to rank/price ads in a feed given competing user and advertiser objectives

How would you A/B test a change to Discover Ads user value and what metrics would you watch

Classic DS&A coding problem with follow-up on complexity and scaling

Debug/triage a production ads-serving issue and trace it to root cause

Explain a past project where you led a design review or influenced a technical decision

How candidates describe it

Real Senior Software Engineer interview stories — retold from candidates' public write-ups, with sources.

Bloomberg · Senior Software EngineerOffer

Bloomberg Senior Software Engineer Interview: Five Rounds, Offer

A Senior Software Engineer candidate applied to Bloomberg's London office through the company's careers site and, after an initial screen, went through five separate on-site conversations covering coding, system design, a recruiter chat, and a hiring-manager round, ultimately accepting an offer.

Interviewed October 2022 · London, United Kingdom

Google · L3 Software EngineerOffer

Google L3 software engineer interview: phone screen, four coding rounds, and the Googleyness round

A candidate with two years of experience went from recruiter outreach to offer over about four months. The onsite was four 45-minute coding rounds — three of them featuring binary trees — and one round turned into a 25-minute chain of follow-ups about approximating an optimal solution at scale.

Interviewed June 2020 · Bangalore, IN

Google · L4 Software EngineerNo offer

Google L4 Software Engineer Interview: Eight Rounds, No Offer

An L4 Software Engineer candidate went through two phone screens, three onsite rounds, a culture conversation, and a team-matching call with a Google hiring manager, then watched the process stall for about a month and a half over a tightened experience requirement before an added extended round ended without an offer.

Interviewed February 2024 · Not specified

View the original posting

All Google Senior Software Engineer interviews

All Google interviews