Contacted by a recruiter. Had a 2 person phone interview and then on site at headquarters. Pretty standard interview: algorithm questions, programming on white boards and all that. The last interview was with a manager role asking design questions. Recruiter wasn't really up front that the position was SE in Test, saying instead that I "may" also be considered for that role when in reality they were really looking mostly to fill that position.
Applied online, received email back. Had a phone interview. Google recruiters came to my college and if you can talk to them and then name drop in the resume it can be helpful. Also helpful if you show them your previous projects.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Very technical questions that included programming something on the spot
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Google (Kirkland, WA) in Sep 2014
Interview
I was initially contacted by a recruiter via email. I replied and we set up a phone call. The recruiter was pushing me towards a Software Engineer in Test role, even though that's not what I currently do - in hindsight I think that was probably a major reason why I didn't get an offer.
Throughout the recruitment experience I kept getting handed off from one recruiter to the next - I think in total there were 5 different people I had to deal with before the interview. It all seemed very disorganized.
One of the recruiters set up a phone screen with an engineer which I passed without issues - there weren't really any challenging questions.
For the onsite interview they were trying to make me travel to Mountain View but I wasn't interested in that so they eventually set up an interview in Seattle for me. The interview was a whole day, I think it was 5 or 6 technical interviews each lasting 45 minutes, and a lunch break with an employee who they claim doesn't submit any feedback. When I first arrived there in the morning the receptionist had a list of people interviewing that day but I wasn't on that list - further disorganization. She eventually worked out who was supposed to meet me.
After the interview I didn't receive any communication from Google for 2 weeks so I decided to email one of the many recruiters and ask if there was any updated. They told me the engineers were busy with peer reviews at the moment so not all feedback was in yet. Another 2.5 weeks went by and I finally got an email that the recruiter wanted to set up a phone call. He called me the next day to inform me that I hadn't passed the interview which I was quite surprised by.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Had to sign an NDA so won't break that here. Overall there wasn't anything too challenging, I've come across more difficult questions in interviews. The more difficult ones were open ended questions about how to test a google service.