Waymo Software Engineer in Mountain View: two robot grid problems, a Street View style infrastructure design and Expressive Words

Software Engineer Interview - CA Mountain View

Recruiter Call

First round was a recruiter chat about the role and scope. Some behavioral questions asked: why Waymo, tell us about your past experiences.

Technical Round 1

Next round involved coding. I was asked a LeetCode style question but not sure if an exact LeetCode existed for this one. It was basically a robot moving across a 2D grid and could move up, down, left, right and had to navigate around obstacles.

Technical Round 2

This round was a system design whiteboarding question. I was asked to design a vehicle fleet used to collect info to build maps, basically design Google Street View, but the question wasn't framed as a user facing app, more focused on the infrastructure side.

Technical Round 3

Another LeetCode style round, this was a variant of Expressive Words. You'd be provided with a string which would contain repeated adjacent letters, and a dictionary which was an array of words, including the correctly spelled version of the one you were provided. Eg: given heeelp and help in the dictionary. The task was to find all the dictionary words that could correspond to the source.

Technical Round 4

The final coding round was a similar grid problem to the first. You were given a grid with obstacles and fuel destinations and a vehicle's starting position. The task was to move to a destination by providing a command sequence of directions to the vehicle, but the constraint was that the vehicle could only hold ten commands in memory which would then repeat.

Team Matching

Last round was team matching, a chat with the hiring managers right after the final technical round which seemed like more of a vibe check. They were very laid back and friendly and told me about what the teams were working on.