just wrapped my GS frontend interview loop for a role on one of their internal tooling teams. sharing because the frontend interview at GS is pretty different from your typical startup or even big tech loop, and i didn't find much about it beforehand.
first thing: GS doesn't do a lot of "build a todo app" style frontend take-homes. they care more about core JavaScript and browser fundamentals than framework-specific React trivia. if you've been writing hooks for 3 years without ever thinking about the event loop, this is a rude awakening.
what came up: vanilla JS: closures, prototypal inheritance, async/await vs promises, event delegation. not "what does this code output" tricks but real "explain the mental model" questions. browser performance: how do you find and fix a slow page, what metrics do you look at, how does reflow vs repaint factor in. they mentioned Core Web Vitals by name. one system design question: design a real-time dashboard that updates on market data. they asked about WebSocket management, state consistency, what happens if the connection drops. accessibility: came up in passing but not deeply assessed. React: one question about component lifecycle and rendering behavior. they weren't dogmatic about framework but knew i'd been working in React so they went there.
behavioral: two rounds, both substantive. "tell me about a time you had to push back on a product requirement for technical reasons" was the sharpest one.
it felt like they want frontend engineers who think like systems engineers. the internal tools they're building are complex, data-dense, performance-sensitive. if your frontend mental model is "write JSX, pass props, done" this loop will expose that.