Google L3 vs L4 vs L5 Interview: What Each Level Is Tested On (Prep Checklist)

At Google, an L5 engineer makes almost three times what an L3 makes. But each level is tested differently, and one weak round can cost you the offer, or the level you wanted.

This page is a simple checklist: find your level, tick the boxes, and practise with the free links in each section.

Pay at Each Google Level (India)

Medians from levels.fyi for Google India, November 2026. "Total pay" means salary + bonus + stock, averaged per year. Your offer can be higher or lower. For the full pay breakdown, see our Google salary by level guide.

How the Google Interview Loop Works (All Levels)

• Before the loop: usually one or two phone screens, each a 45-minute coding problem.
• The loop: usually 4–5 interviews of about 45 minutes. Most are coding. One is Googleyness & Leadership: how you work with people. From L4 up, one or two are often system design.
• You may not get to run your code. Google often uses a plain shared editor. So you must check your code by hand: walk through a small example line by line. This is called a dry run.
• The hiring committee: your interviewers don't decide alone. Each one writes detailed notes, and a hiring committee (a group of senior Googlers who never met you) reads all of them and decides. So one weak round is visible to everyone.
• The level is decided by the committee too. If your rounds look like L3, you can get an L3 offer even if you applied for L4. After that you're matched to a team.

L3 Checklist: Coding

What they check: can you solve a coding problem cleanly, explain it, and prove it works without running it? Usually about 4 coding rounds, plus one Googleyness round.

• I can solve medium problems on graphs, trees, arrays and hash maps in about 30 minutes.
• I know the basics of dynamic programming (1D and simple 2D).
• I talk out loud: I say my idea and its time/space cost, then I code.
• I can dry-run my code by hand on a small example, and catch my own bugs without a compiler.
• I check edge cases myself: empty input, one element, duplicates, very large input.
• I can answer a follow-up like "what if the input doesn't fit in memory?" or "can you make it faster?"
• I have 3–4 stories about teamwork, learning something fast, and handling a disagreement for the Googleyness round. College or internship projects are fine.

Practise on InterviewSkool (free):

• 50 real Google coding interview questions (26 easy, 20 medium, 4 hard), all free
• Full DSA problem list by topic
• Topic guides: trees & graphs · BFS vs DFS · dynamic programming · hash maps · binary search · heaps · tries · backtracking
• How Google's coding round works: Google coding interview guide

Red flag: "Let me just run it and see." At Google you often can't, so not dry-running your code looks like guessing.

L4 Checklist: A Higher Coding Bar

What they check: everything from L3, but harder problems, cleaner code, and fewer hints. Many L4 loops also add a system design round.

• All the L3 boxes above, done faster and with no hints.
• I can solve medium-hard problems: graphs with a twist, interval problems, DP with 2 choices per step.
• My code is clean: good names, small helper functions, no copy-paste.
• I find edge cases before the interviewer points them out.
• In a design round I can: list the requirements → estimate the numbers (users, requests per second, storage) → draw a simple design → go deep on the hardest part.
• I know when to use a cache, a queue, sharding (splitting data across many databases) and a load balancer, and what each one costs you.
• I have Googleyness stories where I owned a project: the problem, what I did, and the result with a number.

Practise on InterviewSkool (free):

• 20 real Google system design interview questions, reported by candidates from Sept 2025 to Sept 2026, each with a full solution
• Start with these case studies: typeahead / autocomplete · URL shortener · rate limiter · web crawler · live comments (all case studies)
• The building blocks: what is system design · caching · message queues · sharding · load balancing · SQL vs NoSQL
• More on this level: Google L4 (SDE-2) interview questions

Red flag: solving the problem only after three hints. At L4 that reads as a strong L3.

L5 Checklist: Senior

What they check: strong coding is still expected, but now one or two system design rounds carry a lot of weight, plus leadership stories.

• In design rounds I drive the interview: I pick the hardest part myself and go deep without being asked.
• For every big choice I give two options and why I picked one (for example, strong vs eventual consistency).
• I can design a real-time shared system, like a Google Docs-style editor where many people type at once, and explain how edits from two people are merged.
• I talk about what breaks: hot keys, a data centre going down, retries causing duplicates, and how I'd notice.
• I can design for Google scale: billions of requests, many regions, and cost.
• I have leadership stories about mentoring someone, leading a project across people or teams, and making a call with incomplete data.
• I have a story about disagreeing with a senior person and how it ended.

Practise on InterviewSkool (free):

• Google-scale case studies: collaborative editing (Google Docs) · Google Drive · search engine · distributed file system · cache hot keys · metrics and monitoring
• Trade-off guides: CAP theorem · consistent hashing · CDN · rate limiting
• Leadership stories: showing leadership in interviews
• More on this level: Google L5 (SDE-3) interview guide

Red flag: a neat diagram with no trade-offs and nothing about failure. At L5 that reads as a strong L4.

Your Googleyness Story Bank

Google has no list like Amazon's Leadership Principles. The Googleyness & Leadership round checks how you work with people: do you help others, handle disagreement well, stay humble, and make good calls when things are unclear?

Write 5–6 stories and reuse them. Each one should follow the STAR shape: Situation → Task → Action (what you did) → Result (with a number). Pick the right size of story for your level.

More help: tell me about a time · common behavioral questions · tell me about yourself · why this company

Quick Self-Check: Which Level Are You Ready For?

If you can't tick every must for the level you're applying to, that's your prep list. Go back to that level's checklist above.

A Simple 4-Week Plan

Want a plan built around your own dates and weak spots? Sign in and use the InterviewSkool prep planner.

Test Yourself at Your Level Before Google Does

The fastest way to find out which level you're at is a real practice interview. On InterviewSkool you can do a mock interview with Alex, our AI interviewer: coding mocks, and system design mocks at SDE-2, SDE-3 or Staff level (about Google L4, L5 and L6), with a score out of 100 and feedback on exactly what kept you from the next level. Your first demo interview is free.

Pay figures are levels.fyi medians and change over time. Round counts are typical, not fixed; each team runs its loop a little differently. InterviewSkool is not affiliated with Google.