We’re starting a new series featuring real interview experiences shared by our readers unfiltered, detailed, and from people who’ve actually been through the process. Up first: a Google L3 Business Analyst / Business Systems Analyst (BSA) interview experience, covering all five rounds.
Role & Compensation Snapshot
| Role | Business Analyst / Business Systems Analyst (BSA), L3 |
| Company | |
| Total rounds | 5 (1 phone screen + 4 virtual onsite) |
| Base salary | ₹18-20 LPA |
| Stocks | ₹7 LPA |
Google’s BSA interview process at L3 is structured around four core competency areas, evaluated across the four onsite rounds: Domain Knowledge & Customer Engagement, Domain Knowledge & Solution Design, Solution Design (Outside of Domain) & Technical Fluency, and Googleyness & Leadership. This structure reflects how Google has been evolving its hiring approach for BSA roles, putting equal weight on technical solution design and softer stakeholder-management skills.
Round 1: Phone Interview (Eliminatory)
This round is explicitly eliminatory clearing it is required to move forward, and it focuses on Solution Design (outside your domain) and Technical Fluency.
What was asked:
- An easy-to-medium SQL question: find employees earning more than the overall average salary, then a follow-up calculating department-wise average salary
- A system design question: design a restaurant booking system, including the data model and the underlying process/workflow
Why this round matters: since it’s eliminatory, the SQL portion is testing baseline technical competence not advanced, but you need to be fluent enough not to fumble basic aggregate and comparison queries under time pressure. The system design portion isn’t expecting a perfect answer; it’s testing whether you can structure your thinking around entities, relationships, and a workflow without being told the schema in advance.
Round 2: Domain Knowledge & Solution Design
What was asked:
- Resume-based questions on prior work experience
- A detailed walkthrough of a challenging reporting project where the candidate was involved end-to-end, from requirements to implementation including who they interacted with, how those interactions went, and how requirements were documented and translated into a design
- A system design task: design a show booking system, including drawing the ER diagram and the data schema, followed by a SQL question based on that same schema
What this round is really testing: the emphasis on “end-to-end” ownership and documentation process suggests Google wants to see your full thinking, not just the final design how you gather requirements, how you translate ambiguous asks into a structured schema, and whether you can reason about your own design when asked a follow-up SQL question against it.
Round 3: Domain Knowledge & Customer Engagement
What was asked:
- The same end-to-end reporting project walkthrough as Round 2 (requirements, stakeholders, documentation process)
- A scenario question: how would you handle a customer who’s having difficulty expressing their requirements?
- A behavioral question: describe the most difficult customer or stakeholder interaction from the last couple of years what was the customer’s perspective, why was it difficult, and what action did you take?
What this round is really testing: this round leans hard into stakeholder management and ambiguity-handling a BSA role lives at the intersection of business needs and technical implementation, so Google is explicitly probing whether you can navigate unclear requirements and difficult stakeholders without technical work to fall back on.
Round 4: Solution Design (Outside of Domain) & Technical Fluency
What was asked:
- Write SQL code for an employee hierarchy system
- A flexible system design prompt: imagine you’ve volunteered to coach a youth sports team (or any team competition) design a system to manage the team and track player/team performance, with an optional schema diagram if comfortable
- Design a schema for an online ordering system
- Write SQL to fetch all orders along with customer ID placed in the last 10 days
What this round is really testing: the “outside of domain” framing matters here these prompts are intentionally unrelated to typical day-to-day BSA work, designed to test whether your data modeling and SQL fundamentals generalize to an unfamiliar context, not just a memorized business-reporting use case.
Round 5: Googleyness & Leadership
What was asked:
- Tell me about a time you helped someone learn something, at work or otherwise
- Tell me about an unusual decision you made and its outcome
- Tell me about a time you improved a system
- Several more questions in a similar behavioral vein
What this round is really testing: “Googleyness” is Google’s own term for cultural fit collaboration, humility, comfort with ambiguity, and a bias toward action. The “unusual decision” and “improved a system” prompts are specifically probing for initiative and independent judgment, not just competence within a defined role.
Key Takeaways for Anyone Prepping for This Role
- The same core story gets asked twice (Rounds 2 and 3 both ask about your end-to-end reporting project) prepare one strong, detailed example you can discuss from multiple angles, since you’ll likely need to revisit it.
- SQL fluency is tested in three separate rounds, always alongside a schema/design task practicing SQL in isolation isn’t enough; practice writing queries against schemas you’ve just designed yourself.
- System design prompts are intentionally generic and unfamiliar (restaurant booking, show booking, youth sports team, online ordering) the specific domain doesn’t matter as much as your process for breaking down ambiguous requirements into entities and relationships.
- Stakeholder-handling questions are not optional extras they appear as their own dedicated round, so behavioral prep deserves as much attention as technical prep for this role.
Frequently Asked Questions
Five total one eliminatory phone interview focused on solution design and technical fluency, followed by four virtual onsite rounds covering domain knowledge, customer engagement, technical fluency, and Googleyness/Leadership.
Based on this candidate’s experience, the offer included a base salary of ₹18-20 LPA plus ₹7 LPA in stock compensation, though actual offers vary by candidate and location.
Yes, SQL questions appeared in three separate rounds (phone screen, Round 2, and Round 4), generally paired with a data modeling or schema design task.
It’s Google’s internal term for cultural and behavioral fit evaluating qualities like collaboration, humility, comfort with ambiguity, and a bias toward independent action, rather than technical skill.
This interview experience was shared by a TechAtPhone reader. Details reflect one candidate’s personal experience and may not represent the exact process for all candidates or locations.
