Thirty days is enough to prepare for Google's coding loop — but only if you spend those 30 days on the right things. The candidates who pass Google's bar in a month follow a specific curriculum: pattern-based DSA prep, daily mock practice, and rubric-aware answer phrasing. This is that plan.
Week 1: Foundations (Days 1-7)
Days 1-3: Arrays and hash maps
Two-pointer, sliding window, prefix sum, hash map for O(1) lookup. Target: 15 problems. Pattern recognition is the goal — see Easy/Medium variations of LeetCode 1, 11, 121, 53, 76, 49, 560.
Days 4-5: Strings
Sliding window on strings, anagram patterns, palindrome center expansion. 10 problems. LeetCode 3, 5, 76, 438, 567.
Days 6-7: Linked lists + stack/queue
Reverse, cycle detection, merge two/k sorted lists, monotonic stack. 10 problems. LeetCode 19, 21, 23, 141, 142, 206, 739, 84.
Week 2: Trees and Graphs (Days 8-14)
Days 8-10: Trees
DFS, BFS, level-order, lowest common ancestor, validate BST, serialize/deserialize. 15 problems. LeetCode 94, 98, 102, 104, 105, 110, 124, 199, 226, 297, 543, 572.
Days 11-14: Graphs + topological sort
BFS/DFS, Union-Find, Dijkstra, topological sort (Course Schedule pattern). 15 problems. LeetCode 200, 207, 210, 261, 305, 547, 684, 695, 743, 802.
Week 3: Dynamic Programming (Days 15-21)
Days 15-17: 1D DP
Climbing stairs, house robber, coin change, longest increasing subsequence. 12 problems. LeetCode 70, 198, 213, 300, 322, 416, 518.
Days 18-21: 2D DP + advanced
Edit distance, LCS, knapsack, palindromic substrings, decode ways. 12 problems. LeetCode 5, 10, 64, 72, 91, 139, 152, 309, 416, 494, 647, 1143.
Week 4: Mocks and System Design (Days 22-30)
Days 22-25: Daily mocks
Two 45-minute mock interviews per day. Use InterviewLift's AI Mock Interview with Google-mode for rubric-calibrated scoring. Focus on verbal communication, not just code correctness.
Days 26-28: System design (L5+ only)
Three system-design topics: design Google Drive, design a URL shortener (bit.ly), design a search ranking system. Use Google-scale anchors: 8.5B queries/day, PB-scale, 100K QPS peak. Read our System Design Cheat Sheet for FAANG.
Days 29-30: Behavioural + Googleyness
Prepare 8 behavioural stories mapped to the Google rubric (GCA, RRK, leadership, Googleyness). Practice 'Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager' and 'Tell me about an ambiguous problem you solved'. InterviewLift's AI Mock Interview includes Google-mode behavioural rounds with Googleyness scoring.
What to Skip
- Solving 500+ LeetCode problems. Quality (pattern coverage + verbal practice) beats quantity.
- Memorising language-specific tricks (Python list comprehensions for everything). Write the code you'd ship.
- Bit manipulation and obscure CS theory unless your role specifically demands it.
- Speed-coding under 10 minutes per problem. Real Google interviews give 40-45 minutes and value structured thinking.
- Reading 'How I prepped for FAANG in 6 months' Medium articles — they are usually survivorship bias.
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