Flipkart Interviews

My interview journey for the SDE-2 role at Flipkart comprised five intensive rounds. It was an insightful experience, though the outcome was quite unexpected.

ROUND 1: Machine Coding (120 minutes - 90 mins coding, 30 mins setup & explanation)

This round focused on Low-Level Design. I was tasked with implementing a flight booking system. The core functionalities required were:

1. Returning flights with the minimum cost.
2. Returning flights with the minimum number of hops.

The system needed to allow an admin to add flights with details like source, destination, flight name, and price. Users would then query for flights between two cities based on the above criteria. A bonus extension involved adding a feature to filter flights based on meal availability. I spent a good amount of time setting up and then explaining my design choices.

ROUND 2: Machine Coding Evaluation (45 minutes)

In this round, I had to explain my design and implementation from Round 1 to the interviewer. We discussed how I approached the problem and the rationale behind my decisions. The interviewer also asked me to consider adding more functionalities, specifically using BFS to find all available flights, and we touched upon design patterns and modularity for future improvements.

ROUND 3: DSA Round

This round presented two LeetCode-style Data Structures and Algorithms problems, both of which I categorized as medium difficulty. I was able to solve both of them.

1. The first problem was Next Greater Element I.
2. The second problem was a variant of the unbounded knapsack problem. The scenario was: "You are going on a trip and you have a total journey duration 'D'. You are given a list of songs with their durations, and you need to listen to the maximum number of songs within that duration, with songs being repeatable."

Clearing this round led to an interview call for the next round on the very same day, which was quite encouraging.

ROUND 4: High-Level Design (HLD) Round

The challenge for this round was to design LeetCode. I began by outlining the functional and non-functional requirements. A significant portion of the interview, about 30 minutes, was dedicated to discussing the essential entities required for such a system. We also covered the necessary APIs. Despite having an hour allocated, the interviewer seemed satisfied after our discussion on entities and APIs and indicated that he had enough information.

ROUND 5: Hiring Manager (HM) Round

This round started with a brief introduction from both sides. We then delved straight into the last project I had been working on. I explained everything about it, including the difficulties I faced. During this discussion, the interviewer posed a hypothetical question: "How would you add a notification service to this project?" I explained my approach, mentioning technologies like Kafka and Fluentd, which seemed to satisfy him. Moving forward, he asked several behavioral questions, which were not overly challenging. Towards the end, he told me about his team and their current work. Overall, this round also went smoothly.

After a few days, I reached out to the person coordinating my interviews for feedback. I was told that a recruiter would contact me shortly. This same statement was repeated the following week and even into the third week. Eventually, I was ghosted, despite my attempts to get proper feedback. They simply said they would call and explain everything, but it never happened, and I stopped calling them. With just 2 years of experience, I figured they probably found candidates with more experience.

I had a technical interview at Flipkart for the SDE-1 role. The interviewer presented me with a problem to determine if a given balanced expression contains duplicate parentheses. I clarified the problem statement using the provided examples, noting that duplicate parentheses mean a subexpression is enclosed by more than one pair of brackets. I then walked through my thought process, explaining how a stack could be used to efficiently solve this problem by tracking characters and checking for the count of non-'(' characters between matching parentheses. After detailing my approach, I proceeded to implement the solution in C++.

During my interview at Flipkart for the SDE-1 role, I was presented with a problem involving N 2D boxes, each having a height (h) and a width (w). The rule was that one box could fit inside another if both its dimensions were strictly smaller (wi < wj and hi < hj). The goal was to find the longest nesting sequence of boxes. I immediately recognized this as a variation of the Longest Increasing Subsequence (LIS) problem but adapted for two dimensions. My approach involved a specific sorting strategy: first, sort all boxes by their width in ascending order. Crucially, if two boxes shared the same width, I sorted them by height in descending order. This clever trick prevents boxes of the same width from being considered for nesting when finding the LIS based on height. After this sort, the problem simplifies to finding the Longest Increasing Subsequence of the heights.

During my Flipkart SDE-1 interview, I was presented with a complex algorithmic problem. The core task was to determine the maximum number of baskets that could be filled. A basket was considered filled if it contained at least K balls of different colors, and I had N balls, with their colors provided in an array. I recognized this as a problem suitable for a binary search approach on the answer. My strategy involved setting left = 0 and right = N / K and then checking if a mid number of baskets was achievable. The check involved iterating through the frequency map of colors; for each color, I could use at most mid balls across all mid baskets. If the total balls used (balls += min(mid, it.second)) met the condition (balls >= (k * mid)), I knew mid was possible and tried for more; otherwise, I reduced my search space.

I underwent a comprehensive interview process for the SDE 3 role at Flipkart in Bangalore. The first round was a 90-minute Machine Coding challenge where I had to design an in-memory message streaming service supporting multiple topics, producers, and consumers, ensuring order, thread safety, and real-time streaming.

Following this, Round 2 was a 30-minute Machine Coding Evaluation, where my solution from the previous round was thoroughly discussed, focusing on modularity, OOP principles, design patterns, and concurrency.

Round 3 was a 60-minute Problem Solving / Data Structures round. I was asked to solve two LeetCode problems: Course Schedule II and Design a Stack With Increment Operation.

The System Design round, lasting 90 minutes, required me to design a quick commerce system similar to Flipkart Minutes.

Finally, the HM Round was a 60-minute discussion where we delved into my past projects and my role in them, along with deep dives into system design topics like Caching, CDNs, and Networks. I was ultimately selected for the role.

I've compiled a list of questions that represent real interview experiences at Flipkart, encountered during various technical rounds. These cover a broad spectrum of technical skills, from core Data Structures and Algorithms to machine coding and system design concepts, providing valuable insights into the expected challenges.

Selected in OA with 20 more students able to complete 3 question
mostly classic question 1-string based comparison with some condition
2)DFS with 8 dirn 3) knight move

Interview - Started
1) alien dictionary - have to code and dry run on test cases - done in 20 min and able to run all test cases

2)Course schedule 3- start with end sorting and comparision based approach they give counter case then shifted to end sorting with
dp approach to which he askted tc then said to optimise it
but not able to optimise

Verdict - Rejected

Oncampus
Tier -1 Clg

yesterday i gave my flipkart grid oa.There was three questions asked based on dsa.i do not remember question properly but i can give u an idea

# 1> a string is multigram if it is not return "-1" otherwise we have to tell shortest anagram from left to right

# 2>we have n cordinates in x,y plane.we have to tell how many straight line can we formed using these cordinates such that in one straight line atleast 3 cordinates point should be present

# 3>i do not remeber 3rd question but it was based on weighted graph

Round 1: DSA (Online Coding)

Q1: Number of Connected Components in a Graph
→ DFS/BFS, O(V + E)

Q2: Boats to Save People
→ Greedy + Sorting, O(n log n)

Asked to explain both brute-force and optimized approaches with time & space complexity.

Round 2: DSA (Online Coding)

Q1: Alien Dictionary
→ Topological Sort (Kahn’s Algo), O(N + K)

Q2: Kth Largest Element in Array
→ Min Heap / Quickselect, O(n log k) / O(n)

Q3: Unique Number III(GFG)
→ Couldn't fully solve but discussed bitwise approach

Asked to explain both brute-force and optimized approaches with time & space complexity.

Round 3: Backend + System Design + CS Fundamentals

Node.js: Event loop, threading, multithreading

DB Design: Hotel Order Management – Entities like Customers, Orders, Menu Items, Payments

Operating Systems: Process vs Thread, Context Switching

I applied via a Google Form posted by Flipkart recruiters on LinkedIn.

Got an invite for the Machine Coding Round just two days later.

Round 1 – Machine Coding

This was a group round with around 30 candidates in a single Meet.

• The first 30 minutes were used to explain the problem statement — we were asked to build a Google Calendar clone.

• There were clearly defined “Must-Have” and “Good-To-Have” requirements.

• We were given 1.5 hours to implement the solution.

After the timer ended, we had to zip our code and submit it via a Google Form.

Round 2 – Machine Coding Evaluation

This was a 30-minute call where I had to:

• Walk the interviewer through my code.

• Discuss the features I implemented.

• I had missed two of the Good-To-Have requirements, and the interviewer asked how I would have done them.

The discussion went well, and the round ended on a positive note.

➡️ Got the result 3 days later, and I was moved to the next round.

Round 3 – Problem Solving & Deep System (PSDS)

Based on others' experiences, I expected LeetCode-style questions, but this round took a different route.

It was a JavaScript deep dive:

• Polyfills

• JS Observers

• Promises (in depth)

• Towards the end, I was asked to implement a Popover component.

➡️ Got feedback in 2 days and moved forward.

Round 4 – UI Tech

This was probably the most technically diverse round of the process.

Topics covered:

• AbortController

• requestAnimationFrame

• Critical Rendering Path (CRP) – a very deep understanding was expected here

• Event loop

• CSS best practices

• CSS specificity

I wasn’t very happy with my performance in this round, but surprisingly, I got the call for the next round.

Round 5 – Hiring Manager (HM)

I was expecting a High-Level Design discussion, but this round turned out to be more relaxed.

• Mostly basic HR-style questions and discussion around my current work.

• The interviewer wrapped it up in 30 minutes.

Spoke to the HR afterward, and the feedback was positive for this round too.

The last round was 3 days ago, and I’m currently waiting for the final result. 🤞

Round 1 - Machine Coding

Implement a small coding solution. The code should be fully executable. Day 1 - one and half hour for understanding and implementing problem. Day 2 - half hour evaluation. Problem was related to billing for an ecommerce app. Had to design and implement bill, discount and point/level calculation system. In the evaluation, they were interested in design choices like choice of classes and functionality, separation of concerns etc. They also went over whar changes I would make in design if I had more time or wanted to incorporate DB etc.

Round 2 - PSDS

Quite simple and standard. Very approachable and supportive interviewer.

1. Finding Right-Most Leaf Node in the Last Level of a Complete Binary Tree. Implement optimal solution. Also discussed solution for any tree
2. Finding Minimum Non-Negative Number NOT present in the List. Only discussed till I reached optimal solution, no need to implement.
3. Given a List of words, return a Map/Dictionary of words which can be formed by using other words which exist in the same list. Example- Input: [“happy”, ”rise”, ”for”, “set”, “sunrise”,"sun", “su”, “nset”, “sunset”, “mind”, “happymind”, “n”, “rise”, “happysunrise”] Output: { “happymind”: [[“happy”, “mind”]], “sunrise”: [[“su”, “n”, “rise”], [“sun”, “rise”]] } Implement any solution.

Round 3 - Design

Design Tournament Racing game. Focus on optimization like what would you do so there is 0 lag on updating leaderboard and pushing notifications during the race to user etc. Totally flopped this one.

HM Round

They did an HM round immediately since he was going on a vacation. It was quite standard with a lot of questions on technical experience and recent work. He explained about the team. I think there was still time so he started asking template questions like strengths, arguments etc but overall quite positive interview.

YOE: ~4 Position: UI Engineer 2 at Flipkart Location: Bangalore Date: June, 2025

Round 1: Machine Coding (Live Coding) This round was conducted on a live video call with around 15 candidates. All the candidates were given the same problem statement to build a chat platform within 1.5 hours.

Round 2 : Machine Coding Review + Technical Concepts This round started with code review of the complete code in the previous round. I was asked to explain each line of code and there were a lot of questions about how I approached a certain part of the code. Talked about Functional and Class Based approach. Discussed Performance Optimisations based on structure, logic and DOM manipulations. Asked to create a function for debounce.

Round 3 : Data Structures and Algorithms Question 1 : Course Schedule Question 2 : Merge Intervals Variation

Round 4 : UI Technical Concepts

• How can we improve build size of frontend
• How can we improve asset heavy app
• Browser storage methods and their comparison
• Create a localStorage wrapper with expiration support
• When we type url in browser, what happens before rendering
• Explain in detail what defines execution of html, css and js files
• Async and defer
• How js is able to achieve async operations
• Difference between async/await and promises
• Promise.race and Promise.any
• Write example for promise.race and promise.any pollyfill to show difference between them
• Web security aspects to consider while developing web app
• Discussion on JWT

Round 5 : Hiring Manager This round focused on my previous projects, work experience, and interpersonal skills. The discussion revolved around: My past frontend projects and the challenges I faced My experience working in a team and handling collaborations Questions assessing my problem-solving approach and mindset It was more of a behavioral and experience-based discussion rather than a technical grilling session.

Verdict: Selected Offer Details: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6907336/flipkart-ui-2-4-yoe-bangalore-by-anonymo-adln/

YOE: 4 Experience: Product Based Company Total rounds: 4 Applied from linkedin referral form shared by recruiter.

Round 1: Machine Coding Round (Duration: 2hrs)

• Invited on Google meet and explained the problem statement. It was related to Hospital Management System.
• Need to manage patient and doctors and allow to book/cancel appointment etc.
• 90 mins time to code it up and submit the code as zip in google form.
• After 2-3 days a 30 mins discussion was scheduled to run the code and also explain the approach and tradeoffs.

Round 2: DSA (Duration: 1hr)

• Need to write code in google doc and dry run the code
• Spiral matrix
• BFS related problem - LC medium

Round 3: LLD (Duration: 1hr)

• Need to come up with Functional requirements.
• Entity, DB schema, Different layers, and api to be written
• Problem: Designing an online gifting platform similar to Ferns & Petals.

Round 4: HM (Duration: 1hr)

• In depth question on projects (even asked to draw the project architecture on draw.io)
• Multiple behavioural and leadership questions
• Typical questions like why flipkart? why leaving current company etc.

#flipkart #interview #sde2

Last month, I appeared for a machine coding round at Flipkart, where I had to implement a simplified food order management system, named FoodKart. It was a 120-minute round, with 30 minutes for problem briefing and 90 minutes for implementation.

The problem involved designing a system that simulates food ordering from restaurants with in-memory data structures. The challenge tested object-oriented design, modularity, clean coding, and extensibility. No UI or database, just plain backend logic.

Evaluation Round

After two days I got a call for evaluation round, where Interviwer asked me to run my code to make sure my code is passing for all test cases.

ClearFit - SDE3 Design a backend system for a new enterprise application that Cleartrip is launching, ClearFit. Cleartrip is partnering up with gyms across Bangalore to enter into the fitness space. For the Beta launch the requirements are as follows: Functionality to onboard centers with details like centerName, center-timings, workout variations. Each center can have N possible workout variations - Weights, Cardio, Yoga, Swimming etc. There could be newer workouts added in the future.

Functionality to define workout slots. Each center will define a workout slot during center timings. These slots would be defined by a center admin. Current scope is that at one point of time for a center, there would be just one workout. The number of seats in each workout slot for a given center is fixed. Current scope is that an admin would define these workout slots on a daily basis for the same day and only once. Update is out of scope

End-User/Customer can perform the following operations: Optional - Register onto the platform. In the current scope we don’t have to worry about authentication. View the workout slots availability/unavailability for the day - filter by workout type (sorted by start time in ASC order). View the workout slots availability/unavailability for the day - filter by workout type and center name (sorted by seats available in ASC order). Book a workout slot for a user if seats are available at that time. Cancel the booked workout slot. Optional - Notify me feature: If a user is interested in some particular slot of a center and seats are unavailable he can choose to be part of the interest list for that slot. Once any other user cancels that particular slot the interested users can be notified. Notification will be pushed to all the interested users. You can use logs to model the notification.

Example :-

Center Onboarding steps AddCentre(“Koramangala”); AddCentretimings(“Koramangala”,List timings); 6 am to 9 am 6 pm to 9 pm

AddCentreActivities(“Koramangala”,List activities); Weights, Cardio, Yoga, Swimming

AddCentre(“Bellandur”); AddCentretimings(“Bellandur”,List timings); 7 am to 10 am 7 pm to 10 pm

AddCentreActivities(“Bellandur”,List activities); Weights, Cardio, Yoga Admin Operation Add Workout and seats to location

addWorkout(, , , , ) addWorkout(“Koramangala”, “Weights”, 6, 7, 100) addWorkout(“Koramangala”, “Cardio”, 7, 8, 150) addWorkout(“Koramangala”, “Yoga”, 8, 9, 200)

addWorkout(“Bellandur”, “Weights”, 18, 19, 100) // this should not be allowed because of time addWorkout(“Bellandur”, “Swimming”, 19, 20, 100) // not allowed because of workout type addWorkout(“Bellandur”, “Cardio”, 19, 20, 20) addWorkout(“Bellandur”, “Weights”, 20, 21, 100) addWorkout(“Bellandur”, “Weights”, 21, 22, 100)

User Operations register(“Vaibhav”)

viewWorkoutAvailability(“Weights”) “Koramangala”, “Weights”, 6, 7, 100 “Bellandur”, “Weights”, 20, 21, 100 “Bellandur”, “Weights”, 21, 22, 100

bookASession bookSession(“Vaibhav”, “Koramangala”, “Weight”, 6, 7)

viewWorkoutAvailability(“Weights”) “Koramangala”, “Weights”, 6, 7, 99 “Bellandur”, “Weights”, 19, 20, 100

CancelSession cancelSession(“Vaibhav”, “Koramangala”, “Weight”, 6, 7)

viewWorkoutAvailability(“Weights”, “Koramangala”) “Koramangala”, “Weights”, 6, 7, 100

Functional notes :- Please handle concurrent scenarios like multiple users booking the same slot. For simplicity, all the operations are performed for a day only. But keep your design extensible and moving operations across days should be done with minimal change. You can take time as an integer since the existing scope is for a day only. There would be a unique identifier of every entity- could be a name or a unique id. You can choose one and assume that it would be unique. Guidelines Time: 120 mins Mandatory programming language - Java. A driver program/main class/test case is needed to test out the code by the evaluator with multiple test cases. But do not spend too much time in the input parsing. Keep it as simple as possible. Evaluation criteria: Demoable & functionally correct code, Code readability, Proper Entity modeling, Modularity & Extensibility, Separation of concerns, Abstractions, Corner case handling. Use design patterns wherever applicable. You are not allowed to use any external databases like MySQL. Use only in memory data structures. Functionality doesn’t have to be defined as a rest api. You can expose them as methods also which can be invoked from the driver class. No need to create any UX Please focus on the Bonus Feature (if any) only after ensuring the required features are complete and demoable. Method signatures defined are just to give an idea. You are free to change them to suit your requirements. Use of the internet is allowed to check the syntax. Using popular java frameworks like spring and dropwizard is allowed.

Round I : Drive LLD round with 40 people on gmeet

Peer to Peer Parcel Delivery System (like Dunzo)

Description

Implement a Peer-to-Peer Delivery System that can be used to deliver a parcel from one customer to another. Below are the expected features of the system.

Problem Statement:

• The system should be able to onboard new customers and drivers.
• The list of items that can be delivered is preconfigured in the system and is fixed.
• Customers should be able to place an order for the delivery of a parcel and also be able to cancel it.
• One driver can pickup only one order at a time.
• Orders should be auto-assigned to drivers based on availability. Even If no driver is available, the system should accept the order and assign it to a driver when the driver becomes free. The number of ongoing orders can exceed the number of drivers.
• Once an order is assigned to a driver, the driver should be able to pick up the order and also mark the order as delivered after delivery.
• The system should be able to show the status of orders and drivers.
• Canceled orders shouldn’t be assigned to the driver. If an assigned order gets canceled the driver shouldn’t be able to pick up the order, the driver should be available for other orders.
• Once a driver picks up an order the order cannot be canceled by the user nor system.
• Assume driver is available 24*7. Ignore the travel time.
• Ensure application is thread safe and all concurrency scenarios.

Bonus:

• Notify the customer and drivers through email and phone for order updates. For this exercise, write a class that represents a vendor providing the email or SMS service and just print the log indicating that the vendor has processed the request
• Customers should be able to rate the driver after delivery.
• Dashboard to show top drivers based on different strategy no of orders, rating.
• If no driver picks up the order within 30 minutes of its creation, the order should be canceled. Regardless of whether an order has been assigned to a driver or not, if no driver picks it up within 30 minutes of order creation, the order should be canceled.

Guidelines:

• Time: 120 mins (Implementation).
• Write modular, clean and demo-able code (Test cases or runtime execution).
• A driver program/main class/test case is needed to test out the code by the evaluator with multiple test cases.
• Use design patterns wherever applicable.
• Please handle concurrency wherever applicable.
• Evaluation criteria: Demoable & functionally correct code, Code readability, Proper Entity modeling, Modularity & Extensibility, Separation of concerns, Abstractions, Exception Handling, Code comments.
• Code should handle edge cases properly and fail gracefully.
• You are not allowed to use any external databases like MySQL. Use only in-memory data structures.
• No need to create any UX or any HTTP API. It should be a standalone application.
• Usage of any AI powered tools such a chatGPT or github-copilot is strictly prohibited. You may use the internet to look up any syntactic references.
• You are free to use any popular programming language of your choice.
• The bonus features are optional. Attempt them only after finishing the p0 features.
• The problem may require you to make certain assumptions. Do make reasonable assumptions and convey them to the review panel.

Sample Test cases:

• The input/output need not be in the same format this is for explaining the expected functionality
• i: input
• o: output

onboard customer - id, name
onboard driver - id, name
create order - customer_id, item_id
cancel order - order_id
show order status - (order_id)
show driver status - (driver_id)
pick up order - (driver_id, order_id)
complete order - (driver_id, order_id)

Round II : Evaluation of the round I where detailed discussion of your design will happen

Round III : Problem Solving Data structure

Was given two problems and asked only to give apporaches and at worst give pesudo code if time permits

1- https://leetcode.com/problems/car-pooling/description/

2- https://leetcode.com/problems/minimize-max-distance-to-gas-station/description/

Round IV : Design and architecture round

Design spotify

Question based on tree in which we have to return the lexicographically smallest path from leaf to root node

another question- https://leetcode.com/problems/zigzag-conversion/description/

Able to solve both the problem, but in first question i took lots of hint to solve it in optimal ways.

verdict-rejected.

Round 1 -

Machine coding jira like app

Round 2 -

Stock buy sell
HashMap/ graph DSU question

Round 3 -

RedBus type app database and api design where vendor has exposed two apis for booking and search

College : Tier 1.5
Current Experience : 4 years and 9 months at MNC

MC round 1 Feedback - positive:

Question - ECommerce Loyalty program with different tiers - Bronze, Silver, Gold. Each tier had different benefits and discounts on purchases.

I wrote a running code while following SOLID principles and design patterns.

The evaluation round was scheduled 2 days later. The interviewer asked me to run the code and asked about the design patterns used.
I believe this round was a strong hire (self rating).

PSDS round 2 Feedback - positive:

There were two DSA questions. I was asked to write pseudo code and do the dry run of the same along with correct time and space complexities. I solved both the problems. Initially I didn't land on optimal approach for question 1 but asked for question 2, solved it and then went back to question 1. Then I gave the optimal approach.

Q1: 1760. Minimum Limit of Balls in a Bag
Q2: 380. Insert Delete GetRandom O(1)

I believe the questions were on the easier side. As I solved both of them, with optimized approach fairly quickly, I believe this round was also a strong hire (self rating).

Design round 3 Feedback - positive:

It was an HLD round. I was asked to design a distributed job scheduler.

I asked for the functional and non-functional requirements. Did back of the envelope estimations. Moved on to the high level design for small number of users and then scaled it for a distributed system. Explained every component used in the design in detail. After the explanation, interviewer asked me to draw the design in Figma or something. I didn't have experience of doing it on any software. I asked to draw on paper and attach the picture in the google sheet provided. The interviewer agreed.

As we were already past 1 hour, I was asked to design quickly. After I attached in the google sheet, the interviewer pointed out a few improvements to the design (I would say, I could've done better if I wasn't rushed for time).

Due to the time constraint, I believe this round was hire (self rating - could've been better, wasn't flawless)

HM round 4 Feedback - negative:

There were 2 interviewers. One was reverse shadowing.
Discussion was mostly limited to resume at first. Then later on went on to SaaS, on-prem etc.
Some of the questions are:
Tell about any of your project's architecture.
Any issues you resolved of high priority?
Have you worked on performance tuning?
What is the capacity of your system's DB?
Some questions regarding mentoring junior members
Some questions on agile specific to team.
Some questions on tests framework used and coverage.
Why do you want to switch?
Why flipkart?

I would say depending upon the discussion this round should've been neutral to lean hire.

Recruiter emailed me the next day about rejection. I asked for the feedback but no reply. I even called the recruiter but the call wasn't picked up. I couldn't understand where it went wrong after 3 good rounds.

My Interview Experience and offer (Flipkart Data Scientist 2 role (Grade 9))
Off-campus opportunity via referral.

a) Screening round :
i) 30 mins interview with Research Director
ii) General interview, revolved around my past work and some behavioral questions

b) Depth in Math Modelling :
i) 1 hr interview with Principal Data Scientist / Director
ii) The DMM round interview focuses on Logistic Regression and CLIP/BLIP models, assessing both theoretical rigor and practical expertise. Logistic Regression questions delve into Binary Cross Entropy, Bayes' Theorem, Bernoulli/binomial distributions, L2 regularization, and the derivation of the loss function, emphasizing probabilistic foundations and model learning. CLIP/BLIP questions cover the architecture, contrastive loss for image-text pairs, limitations in semantic understanding, QFormer’s role in capturing meaning, and handling batches (e.g., 32 pairs). They also explore evaluation metrics like ROC-AUC, PR-AUC, Median Rank, and model calibration, alongside strategies for data imbalance, hard negatives, and mitigating catastrophic forgetting, requiring a strong grasp of machine learning theory and vision-language model applications.

c) Depth in Data Science :
i) 1 hr interview with Senior Data Scientist
ii) The DDS round focused on ML system design, particularly building an end-to-end pipeline from an abstract problem. I was asked to design a solution for credit risk modeling—for example, Flipkart launching a new EMI feature where we need to decide EMI approvals (a binary classification task). The challenge involved a cold start scenario with no existing user data and no access to users' bank information. For every approach I took, I was asked follow-up questions like "why this?" and "why not that?" to justify my choices and demonstrate a clear understanding of the reasoning behind each decision.

If you pass both of these rounds, based on the average rating from each, you move on to the next round, which is the coding round.

d) Coding round :
i) 2 hr interview with senior Data Scientist
ii) The coding round emphasized problem-solving approach and coding skills. Internet access was allowed only for referencing documentation. I was given a fraud detection problem and tasked with writing end-to-end code, covering everything from data loading to model inference.

e) Hiring Manager round (Foundational Model Team (FMT) team) :
i) A 1-hour interview with the manager of the team.
ii)The questions in this round were tailored to the team's focus. Since it was a Foundational Model team, the discussion revolved entirely around Generative AI.
iii) The HM round focused on understanding my past work, my approach, and the reasoning behind it. It also included questions on which the team is currently working on like fine-tuning LLMs, VLMs, and multiple reward policies like DPO and PPO, followed by behavioral and values-based questions.

Since confirmation was taking time from the FMT team, I had another HM round with the Cleartrip team.

f) Hiring Manager round (Cleartrip team) :
i) A 1-hour interview with the manager of the team.
ii) The HM round focused on my past work, approach, and reasoning. I was also asked about the team's current focus, like dynamic pricing. I was given a problem to set discounts on multiple shoe brands, considering competitors, and building a model to maximize revenue.

Compensation details : https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6740368/flipkart-data-scientist-2-bangalore-by-a-yfrk/

30min initial brefing call of the problem 90min for coding : use any local IDE and submit the code in ZIP!

Library Management System

Problem Definition: Design and implement a Library Management system that caters to its registered members by cataloging and housing books that can be borrowed.

The system must provide the following functionalities:

• Add books to the catalog: Every book will be added by name and author and the program must generate a unique id for it by joining the first three letters of the author’s last name to a number to create a unique key. For example, a book by Rowling would have ROW1234 as a unique Id. Also, note that the library can have more than one copy for a book.

• Register and unregister users in the Library

• Reservation Management system: A user should be able to make a request to borrow a book from the library.

  • Users can borrow books by the book id (eg - ROW1234). For the scope of problems, let's assume users are aware of book id’s.
  • If the book is available and not borrowed by anyone, it should be reserved to the member’s name.
  • If the book is already borrowed by another user, the reservation system must add the requesting member to a FIFO waitlist of reservations. When the book is returned to the library, it will not be marked as available and will be available only to the first user under the FIFO queue
  • If the user is the first user of the FIFO waitlist, the book can be reserved under the user’s name

• Fine calculation system: A user is allowed to borrow a book only for 14 days. If this time limit is exceeded at the time of return, the system should calculate a fine of 20 rupees per day for the number of days delay.

Good To Have (Bonus): One user should only be allowed to reserve one copy of the book Auditing: Design should cater to following use cases: Given a bookId, give a list of users having that book Given a userId, list of books issued to him

Other details: **Use of a DB is not allowed. We are expecting in-memory data structures to support the application.

Expectations:

• Functionally correct code (whatever feature is completed)
• Create the sample data yourself. You can put it into a file, test case or main driver program itself. Unit test cases are not expected.
• Code should be demo-able.
• Code should be modular. Code should have basic OO design. Please do not jam the responsibilities of one class into another.
• Code should be extensible. Wherever applicable, use interfaces and contracts between different methods. It should be easy to add/remove functionality without re-writing the entire codebase.
• Code should handle edge cases properly and fail gracefully.
• Code should be legible and readable.
• CLI, Web based application, REST API and UI are not expected.

Guidelines:

• Please discuss the solution with an interviewer
• Please do not access internet for anything EXCEPT syntax
• You are free to use the language of your choice
• All work should be your own
• Please focus on the Bonus Feature only after ensuring the required features are complete and demoable.

Hi community,
I recently gave flipkart SDE2 interviews, I filled a google form circulated by a recruiter, Then next day I had machine coding round(on saturday), following monday I had machine coding evaluation round.
He asked me what design i used, which design will be used if I want to do some async task then ran some test cases on my code.

Problem Statement:

Ecommerce with Loyalty Program - Machine Coding Round Problem Statement: Design a service that adds gamification elements to an e-commerce platform. This service will track user transactions, allowing users to purchase products, redeem existing points during purchases (with constraints based on user level), and earn new points from those purchases. The service should incentivize purchases and engagement using points and levels, and it should be designed to be flexible and extensible. Functionalities Required: Onboard User Onboard user to our platform onboard <user_name>

Guidelines: Time: 90mins Write modular and clean code. A driver program/main class/test case is needed to test out the code by the evaluator with multiple test cases. But do not spend too much time in the input parsing. Keep it as simple as possible. Evaluation criteria: Demoable & functionally correct code, Code readability, Proper Entity modelling, Modularity & Extensibility, Separation of concerns, Abstractions. Use design patterns wherever applicable You are not allowed to use any external databases like MySQL. Use only in memory data structures. No need to create any UX Please focus on the Bonus Feature only after ensuring the required features are complete and demo-able. Use of Gen AI or any other tool to write code is prohibited
Verdict: Passed

Round 2: PSDS Round:
Problems asked were like this


PSDS Round questions:

Input ["FreqStack", "push", "push", "push", "push", "push", "push", "pop", "pop", "pop", "pop"] [[], [5], [7], [5], [7], [4], [5], [], [], [], []] Output [null, null, null, null, null, null, null, 5, 7, 5, 4]

This round went so well from my side as I solved all questions.
Verdict: Passed

Round 3: Design Round
Recruiter called me on thursday saying you have design round tomorrow, as I was supposed to be in office, I told her to move this either to saturday or monday, she said she has to complete everything by wednesday.
She scheduled design round on friday 4PM and rescheduled to 2PM.
The questions asked were like this

Design Round question:

Design a ticket booking system for movies. For example: bookmyshow Functionality to be implemented: ● Search movie(by name, by theatre name) ● Book ticket ● Cancel ticket ● List upcoming movies I was told to write first human interfaces,not any language specific just human interface then I was told to design DB and freedom to choose any db, and then he found mistakes in each table.

PS: I messed this round as I lacked multiple basics and interviewer pointed out. Interviewer was helpful and it went for 1.5hrs
Verdict: Self rejecting myself
Edit: Got the rejecion mail

Just finished the machine coding round for Flipkart, and it was quite an interesting experience! Around 15 of us were on the call, all tackling the same challenge within a 90-minute timeframe.

DSA Round (60 mins)

• 2 Questions (Medium level)
• 45 mins to solve
• 15 mins for Introduction & Q/A

Areas to focus on:

• Time Complexity understanding
• Edge Cases
• Choice of best data structure.
• Be verbose, keep it interactive.

During my interview process for Flipkart, I was given a machine coding challenge that required me to build an online food ordering system, which they named 'Feed.Me'. I had 90 minutes to implement the system, focusing on key features such as restaurant management, menu updates, order placement, and an intelligent auto-assignment mechanism based on various criteria like lowest cost or highest rating. The problem emphasized handling concurrent orders, managing restaurant capacity, and ensuring the code was modular, extensible, and well-tested using an in-memory store. I also had to consider several bonus requirements, like updating restaurant capacity and adding new selection criteria.

Hey everyone, I recently had the opportunity to interview with Flipkart for an SDE-3 backend role in December 2024. I secured the interview through a referral from a friend. I'm currently working as an SDE-2 at Amazon.

Round 1 (Data Structures & Algorithms)

This round focused on two coding problems. I managed to solve both of them efficiently.

Round 2 (Machine Coding)

This round involved implementing an online food ordering system. The follow-up discussion on this machine coding round didn't go as well as I hoped, possibly because it was one of my earlier experiences with such a format.

Overall, my application resulted in a "No Hire" decision.

How I applied:

I came across a hiring drive for SDE-2 on LinkedIn, which was posted by a recruiter. I applied there, and after about a week, I received a mail confirming that I was shortlisted for the interviews.

Round 1: Machine Coding (90 mins)

I was provided with a document outlining a machine coding question. My task was to implement an auction system on my local machine. A set of mandatory requirements had to be fulfilled, and there were also bonus requirements that I could attempt if I had extra time. Throughout the coding process, I had to ensure that basic OOPs principles were implemented, suitable design patterns were used, and the code remained modular and extensible.

Round 2: Machine Coding Evaluation (30 mins)

This round took place the day after the first round. My primary task was to explain the code that I had submitted from the machine coding challenge in Round 1.

Round 3: Problem Solving & Data Structures (1 hr)

This round occurred two days after the second round. I was given two problems to solve:

1. The first problem was Walls and Gates.
2. The second problem I don't remember exactly, but I solved it using a Hashmap.

Round 4: System Design (1 hr)

This round focused primarily on low-level design. I was asked to provide a design for a system similar to BookMyShow. This exercise required me to design the database schema, API design, and overall low-level architectural considerations.

Round 5: Hiring Manager Round (1 hr)

This round was mostly technical. The initial part involved a deep dive into my past projects and discussions about my design choices. The last 15 minutes of the round were dedicated to basic behavioral questions.

Verdict:

I was selected and received the offer letter after a week, which I subsequently accepted.

Application Process

I applied for an SDE-2 position at Flipkart after seeing a recruiter post about a hiring drive on LinkedIn. After about a week, I received an email confirming that I was shortlisted for the interviews.

Round 1: Machine Coding (90 mins)

For the first round, I was provided with a document containing a machine coding question. My task was to implement a phonebook application on my local machine. There was a set of mandatory requirements that I had to fulfill, and an additional set of bonus requirements that I could attempt if I had time left. Throughout the coding process, I focused on implementing basic OOPs principles, utilizing suitable design patterns, and ensuring the code was modular and extensible.

Round 2: Machine Coding Evaluation (30 mins)

This round took place on the same day as the first. Here, I had to explain the code I had submitted from the machine coding round.

Round 3: PS-DS Round (1 hr)

A week after the second round, I had my Problem Solving and Data Structures round. Since my Last Working Day (LWD) at my previous organization was only a few days away, the next three rounds were scheduled within a tight span of two days. In this round, I was given two questions:

1. Given an integer array, print the count of subarrays which had at most K distinct elements.
2. Given a number, find the minimum number of operations to reduce the number to zero. An operation is defined as subtracting one of the digits from the number.

I managed to solve both questions fairly quickly, which led to an extension for the second problem where I was asked to print all the operations performed.

Round 4: System Design (1 hr)

This round was primarily focused on high-level system design. I was tasked with providing a design for an UrbanClap-like system. The interviewer expected a comprehensive solution covering database schema design, API design, and the overall high-level architecture.

Round 5: HM Round (1 hr)

My final round was with the Hiring Manager. This session was mostly technical, with the last 15 minutes dedicated to basic behavioral questions. We delved deep into my past projects and discussed my design choices in detail.

Verdict

I received the offer letter a week later and have since accepted the position.

During my machine coding round at Flipkart for the SDE2 position, I was presented with a detailed problem statement to develop a doctor-patient appointment booking application. The core challenge involved designing a system where doctors could register, declare their availability in 30-minute slots from 9 am to 9 pm, and patients could search for doctors by specialty, book appointments, and cancel them. A crucial aspect was implementing a waitlist feature: if a desired slot was booked, patients could join a waitlist, and the first person on the list would automatically get the slot if it became available. I also needed to implement a system for viewing booked appointments and a bonus feature to track trending doctors. The round had a time limit of 90 minutes, emphasizing modular, clean code, proper entity modeling, and extensibility, all while using only in-memory data structures.

I applied for an SDE-2 position at Flipkart after seeing a recruiter's post on LinkedIn. I filled out a Google form and was later invited to a call where the entire interview process was explained, which involved around 50 candidates. An elimination round for Machine Coding was scheduled two days later.

Round 1: Machine Coding

For this round, I was tasked with writing code for a phonebook application. There were 5-6 mandatory requirements that needed to be fully functional for a high chance of selection. Additionally, some bonus functionalities were provided, which were not strictly required.

Round 2: MC Evaluation

A 30-minute call was scheduled on the same day to evaluate my machine coding solution. An SDE-3 joined, and I had to explain my entire code. I demonstrated all the required functionalities and elaborated on my implementation. The focus was on modularity, adherence to SOLID principles, and the use of design patterns. If I had missed anything, this was an opportunity to explain my reasoning.

After this round, I waited a week for the results. Since my Last Working Day (LWD) was approaching, the subsequent rounds were fast-tracked and scheduled within two days.

Round 3: PS-DS Round

Two Data Structures and Algorithms questions were asked:

1. Given an integer array, count the number of subarrays having at most k distinct elements.
2. Given a number, we need to find the minimum number of operations to be done so that the number becomes 0. The operation is to subtract the digits from the number. I solved both questions pretty fast, so I was given an extension to the second question, which was to print all the operations done.

Round 4: System Design (HLD)

This round focused on High-Level Design. I was given a set of requirements and asked to design an UrbanClap-like system. I had to draw the HLD on an online board. The discussion covered various aspects, including database choices, scalability, availability, and both functional and non-functional requirements. We also delved into database schema design and API design for the specified requirements.

Round 5: Managerial Round

This round involved a deep dive into my current project with the Hiring Manager. We discussed the architectural choices I made in my project, transitioning into a more general HLD discussion. The last 15 minutes were dedicated to behavioral questions.

I successfully cleared all the rounds and received an offer from Flipkart.

My interview journey at Flipkart for an SDE2 role began with a Machine Coding round in June 2024. I was tasked with building an application similar to CricBuzz, incorporating features like handling white balls, no balls, changing the crease, and displaying a scoreboard. I had 30 minutes for question understanding and 90 minutes for coding. Although I cleared this round, the feedback wasn't entirely positive.

Next was the DSA round, also in June 2024, where I successfully solved two basic Dynamic Programming questions within an hour, receiving positive feedback and clearing the round with performance up to the mark.

The third round, again in June 2024, focused on System Design. For this hour-long discussion with a panel of two members, I had to design Google Calendar, including additional requirements related to scheduled events. I cleared this round as well, though the feedback indicated my performance wasn't quite up to the mark.

Finally, I had a Hiring Manager (HM) round, also in June 2024. The manager delved into my past experience and presented a challenge: implementing a price drop alert functionality for Flipkart. I felt I answered all questions satisfactorily within the 30-45 minute discussion, and my performance was considered up to the mark.

Ultimately, I received an offer for the position. However, it was suggested that my profile was better suited for an SDE1 role, despite initial discussions for SDE2 at ₹32 LPA. The final offer was a modest 10-15% hike. Considering the 5-day work-from-office requirement in Bangalore and the company being in its seed stage, I chose to decline the offer.

My recent interview journey for an SD2 position at Flipkart spanned over two months and included a series of rigorous rounds. Here's how it unfolded:

Initial Contact

On June 5th, I was approached by a recruiter who had found my resume – I'm still not entirely sure how! They quickly scheduled my first interview for June 7th.

Round 1: Machine Coding

This round was a unique experience conducted in a group meeting. After a briefing from a helpful SDE 3, I had 90 minutes to code a solution in my preferred IDE. The problem involved building a small tech Q&A platform, similar to a simplified version of Stack Overflow. I had to implement seven mandatory features, and I successfully completed all of them using a modular approach. The interview concluded with a code evaluation and some cross-questioning, which I felt went very well.

Round 2: Problem Solving and Data Structures (PSDS)

In this round, I was asked to solve two medium-level problems that are common on LeetCode: House Robber and Gas Station. I provided both brute-force and optimized solutions for both problems, and this round was successful.

Round 3: System Design

This round was led by a Senior Software Engineer. My task was to design a rate limiter. The design discussion was comprehensive, evolving from a local implementation to a global one, and covered both high-level and low-level design aspects thoroughly.

Rounds 4: Hiring Manager Interviews

These final rounds were conducted by senior managers and focused on a blend of technical and behavioral aspects. I discussed my current project, the technologies I've worked with, team structure, and system design challenges from my past experiences. Both rounds lasted about 30 minutes each and concluded positively.

The Outcome

After a period of 15 days of negotiation following the interviews, I finally received an offer. The entire process was thorough and quite a journey, taking about two months from initial contact to offer.

Round 1: Machine Coding Round (2 hours)

The first 30 minutes involved a briefing of the problem statement by an SDE 3, where all candidates were added to a meeting to understand the requirements. For the next 1.5 hours, I was required to code the solution in my preferred IDE and submit a zip file via a Google Form. During this part, I had to share my screen, and the session was recorded.

Round 2: PSDS (1 hour)

In this round, I was presented with two questions that were of medium-hard difficulty.

Round 3: LLD Round (1 hour)

This round focused on Low-Level Design, where I was asked to design a specific system.

Round 4: Hiring Manager Round (1 hour)

The final round was with a senior manager. This discussion revolved around my current projects, team structure, the technologies I have experience with, and some behavioral questions.

I applied for the SDE-2 (Backend) position at Flipkart via LinkedIn, and the recruiter reached out to me on June 5th to schedule an interview for June 7th.

Round 1: Machine Coding Round
This round started with a briefing from an SDE 3, who patiently answered all our questions for 30 minutes. Following this, I had 90 minutes to code a solution in my preferred IDE. Initially, all candidates were in a shared meeting, but midway, we were moved to separate meetings with individual interviewers to continue working on the problem.

The question involved building a Tech Q&A platform where users could ask or answer tech-related questions and follow topics. I was given 7 mandatory features to implement and 2 bonus features. I managed to implement a workable and modular code covering all 7 mandatory features. After submitting the code via a Google form, I had an evaluation round where the interviewer cross-questioned me on my code. I was able to answer all questions, and this round went well, leading to my next interview.

Round 2 (PSDS - Problem Solving & Data Structures)
In this round, I was asked two LeetCode medium-level questions.
The first question was Longest Repeating Character Replacement, for which I provided an optimal solution.
For the second question, Pacific Atlantic Water Flow, the interviewer provided a hint, which helped me arrive at the solution. This round also went well, and I received a call to schedule my system design and Hiring Manager rounds for the same day.

Round 3 (System Design)
An SDE2 interviewed me and asked me to design a payment processing system with support for multiple payment gateways. I presented a High-Level Design (HLD) of the system, including APIs and entities.

Round 4 (Hiring Manager)
I was interviewed by a senior manager who focused on my current project, team structure, technologies I've worked on, and some behavioral questions. This round lasted 1.5 hours.

After a week without a call from HR, despite my attempts to reach out, I finally heard from the recruiter. They informed me that my feedback from previous rounds was positive and they wanted to conduct another Hiring Manager round.

Round 5 (Hiring Manager)
This round involved two interviewers, one of whom was a Senior Manager. They questioned me about my current project, delved into Java specifics, and discussed system design topics.

Again, there was a week-long delay before I got a call for a discussion with the Director. This was not a technical round but rather a conversation about my experience and Flipkart's work culture. About 4-5 days later, I received an email requesting documents for verification.

Verdict
The entire process spanned roughly a month, but I ultimately received an offer for the SDE-2 role.

I applied for the SDE 2 position at Flipkart through LinkedIn. The interview process consisted of four distinct rounds.

Round 1: Machine Coding

This round began with a 30-minute briefing, followed by 1 hour 30 minutes for coding, and concluded with a 30-minute evaluation. I was given a prompt to design a restaurant management system. For my approach, I utilized several standard design patterns:

• A Repository interface with an in-memory implementation to handle all database-related APIs.
• A Singleton pattern for the in-memory implementation to ensure a single instance.
• A Strategy pattern for implementing the filtering logic, such as by veg/non-veg or category.

I found that thoroughly walking through the complete user journey in my head before explaining it to the evaluator was quite helpful for structuring my thoughts.

Round 2: Data Structures and Algorithms (1 hour)

This round involved three problems: an easy one from LeetCode to Design HashSet, a medium problem on Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters, and another medium problem on Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree. Since I had solved all of these problems before, I didn't find this round particularly difficult. I explained my approach by starting with a brute-force solution and progressively optimizing it, detailing each step of the refinement. I attribute my ability to perform this step-by-step optimization to consistently following the Take You Forward (Striver) YouTube channel. Additionally, practicing dry runs on a code editor or notepad before the interview proved invaluable, especially since I was asked to write only pseudo-code.

Round 3: Design Round (1 hour)

This round was intended to cover both Low-Level Design (LLD) and High-Level Design (HLD), but the interviewer focused almost exclusively on LLD. I was asked to design BookMyShow, following specific steps: identifying actors, listing use cases, concurrently writing APIs and business entities, and finally designing the database schema. In my professional work, I usually integrate these steps in a more fluid, non-linear fashion, so adhering to a strict linear progression was quite challenging. The interviewer frequently interrupted my thoughts when I tried to jump ahead to class or database design. The interview, originally scheduled for an hour, extended to 1 hour 40 minutes! Aside from the database design, I felt this round was somewhat redundant, almost a repeat of Round 1 but with less freedom to articulate my thought process and solutions.

Round 4: Hiring Manager (1 hour)

This interview was entirely based on my resume and previous work experiences, with a strong focus on my current job. The hiring manager was particularly interested in the LLD aspects of the features I had implemented, so I explained the database design of those projects in detail. This was followed by a series of common behavioral interview questions such as "What are your Strengths and Weaknesses?", "Why are you switching?", "How do you keep yourself updated?", and "Explain one of the technologies you recently learned." The round lasted for an hour.

The response time between each interview round typically ranged from 1 to 3 days, and the final salary negotiation process took almost a week. The HR team was quite responsive throughout, which made the overall experience hassle-free.

I recently had an interview opportunity at Flipkart for an SDE-1 role after filling out a Google form and being shortlisted for the online assessment.

Online Assessment (June 16th, 2024 - SHL Platform)

The online assessment consisted of three DSA (Data Structures and Algorithms) questions, all at a LeetCode Medium-Hard difficulty level. I was only able to solve two questions completely.

1. A Graph-based problem, which was similar to Reconstruct Itinerary.
2. Another problem, Create Maximum Number.
3. A Tree-based problem (I don't recall the specifics).

Technical Interviews (June 20th, 2024)

I received an email on June 19th inviting me to the next round of interviews, which took place the very next day. There were three interviews in total:

Round 1: Problem Solving and Data Structures (PSDS) — 60 minutes

This round started with introductions. The interviewer asked about my favorite data structure, and I mentioned LinkedList, explaining why. They then provided a Google Doc link with two problems:

1. A linked list problem similar to Reverse Linked List II, but instead of positions, two unique node values were given to define the sublist to be reversed. I spent a good 30-40 minutes on this, coding it completely on Google Docs and dry-running it with 2-3 examples.
2. Gas Station. For the second question, I had limited time. I explained my initial thoughts and suggested a greedy approach, which the interviewer acknowledged was on the right track and didn't ask me to code.

The interview concluded with me asking a few questions.

Round 2: PSDS Round 2 (60 minutes)

This round felt relatively easier compared to the first one. I managed to solve both coding questions with correct approaches and discussed multiple solutions along with their time complexities. One was a DFS/DP-based problem, and the other was a Two Pointers/DP solution to find the total number of good subarrays under some condition (which I unfortunately forgot).

With some time remaining, the interviewer asked theoretical questions about graphs. We then had a good discussion about Flipkart, their team, technologies, and the challenges they face. There were two interviewers present, with one observing, and I also had a good discussion with the observer at the end.

Round 3: Hiring Manager (HM) Round (45 min)

The interview began with introductions; the Hiring Manager shared a detailed introduction about himself, his experience at Flipkart, the technology used, and his team. I then gave a brief introduction about myself.

The interviewer shared a Google Doc link for a design problem: Design a calculator with basic functionalities (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) that can store the last five operations and allow users to modify any stored operation. We discussed suitable data structures for this task, considering different options like doubly linked lists, vectors, and ultimately settling on a deque. We had an in-depth discussion about the challenges associated with each data structure choice (e.g., why a vector might not work). I then coded the solution using an object-oriented approach, and the interviewer was satisfied.

Next, we discussed a project I had worked on. I demonstrated my deployed project, which seemed to impress the HM, and he requested to see the code. I explained my approach, leading to a good conversation of over 20 minutes. We then moved on to another project.

Finally, we discussed HR-based questions, including achievements, moments of pride, instances of failure, and my internship experience (or lack thereof), particularly how I managed college requirements without an internship. This round was quite long, lasting about 1 hour and 20 minutes.

Conclusion

I was ultimately rejected. I believe my chances were likely fewer because I felt I messed up in the last round. It was scheduled so quickly, and I found it challenging to adjust, so things didn't go according to plan. However, I learned a lot from the HM round, even if the first two felt more straightforward. While the last round was a challenging experience, it highlighted areas for improvement, particularly in my soft skills.

I received an email from a Flipkart recruiter on June 27th, asking about my availability for an SDE 2 interview on June 29th. Despite the short notice, I readily agreed, knowing the value of such an opportunity.

Round 1: Machine Coding Round - June 29th

This round involved all interviewees joining a single call. We were tasked with building a working console application. The Flipkart SDE 3 explained the problem and conducted a Q&A session from 9:30 AM to 10:00 AM, allowing us to clarify any doubts. We then had from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM to build the application, remaining on the call throughout.

The core problem was to design a cache where a user could insert, fetch, and remove data. A key requirement was the ability to select the eviction policy at runtime. Examples of eviction policies provided included LRU (Least Recently Used) and TimeEviction. I successfully built a working application incorporating all the specified features.

Round 1.1: Machine Coding Evaluation - June 29th

Following the machine coding round, my code was evaluated. This session ran from 12:45 PM to 1:45 PM. I was asked to run my submitted code and explain my design approach. I had utilized the Strategy and Factory design patterns for the eviction policy feature, and I answered questions related to these patterns. The interviewer also asked me to demonstrate how I would add a new eviction policy to my existing design, aiming to assess the extensibility of my solution. I addressed all questions, and the interviewer seemed pleased with my design. Shortly after, I received a positive call from HR, confirming my progression.

Round 2: PSDS (DSA) - June 29th

This was a Data Structures and Algorithms round, scheduled from 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM, featuring two medium-level questions. The interviewer, an SDE 2 at Flipkart, was very supportive. The questions were:

1. A Binary Tree problem, specifically Binary Tree Maximum Path Sum.
2. A Binary Search problem, similar to Koko Eating Bananas.

I successfully answered both questions and received a call for the subsequent rounds.

Round 3: Design Round - June 30th

The design round, lasting from 12:20 PM to 1:20 PM, focused on a system design problem, covering both High-Level Design (HLD) and Low-Level Design (LLD). I was asked to design a URL shortener application and its API endpoints. The discussion also extended to designing for multiple data centers, scaling the database using sharding and partitioning, and improving system performance with technologies like Kafka, SQL vs. NoSQL considerations, and Redis. This round was satisfactory. The interviewer, a Principal Architect at Flipkart, primarily expected HLD discussions and related questions. I got a call for the HM round after this.

Round 4: HM Round - June 30th

My final round was with the Hiring Manager, from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM, and was conducted by a Director of Engineering. This round focused on managerial and behavioral questions. I discussed my latest performance review, my favorite project I've worked on, and identified two people in my workplace whom I look up to. We also touched upon Flipkart's entry into quick commerce (the Zepto deal) and Walmart's acquisition of Flipkart. This round went well.

It's been almost six days since my last interview, and I haven't yet received a verbal offer from Flipkart. I've contacted HR twice, and each time I was told a recruiter would call by EOD, which hasn't happened. This concludes my interview experience for the Flipkart SDE 2 role.

I applied for the SDE-1 role at Flipkart through a form circulated by HR on LinkedIn. My interview process consisted of four rounds.

Round 1: Online Test

Round 2: Problem Solving/Data Structures

Round 3: Problem Solving/Data Structures

After a few hours, I received an email about an upcoming HM round on the same day, which was then postponed due to some work emergencies and happened the next day.

Round 4: Hiring Manager (HM) Round

After five days, I received the mail confirming my selection for the SDE-1 position.

I applied for the SDE-1 role at Flipkart through a form shared by HR on LinkedIn. My journey started with an online test, followed by several interview rounds.

Round-1 (Online Test):
This round, conducted on the SHL platform, consisted of three coding questions that were heavily based on graph and dynamic programming concepts. I had 90 minutes to complete them.

Round-2 (PS/DS Round):
After about 10-12 days, I received an email confirming my selection for the next round. This round, held the very next day, involved two specific coding problems. I managed to solve Symmetric Tree in about 15-20 minutes and Maximal Square in approximately 30 minutes.

Round-3 (PS/DS Round):
I got mail that I had cleared Round 1 and 2 on the same day, and Round 3 was scheduled for the following day. This round felt a bit tougher than the previous one, and three questions were asked. The first was Minimum Number of Jumps to Reach End of a Given Array, which took me a considerable amount of time as I discussed approaches from brute force to an optimized greedy solution. Next, I faced Find Square Root of a Number Upto Given Precision using Binary Search. The constraints were high (n was 10^18), and while I initially gave a normal solution, the interviewer was very supportive and helped me realize binary search was the optimal approach, which I then solved. The last question was Sliding Window Maximum, a standard problem I've solved many times. I was asked to directly provide the optimized approach, which I did in just 10 minutes.

Round-4 (HM Round):
A few hours later, I received an email for the Hiring Manager round, which was initially scheduled for the same day but got postponed to the next due to some work emergencies. This round lasted about 50 minutes and focused heavily on my internships, my favorite projects, and various behavioral questions.

Five days after the HM round, I received the exciting news of my selection!

I initiated my application for the SDE-1 role at Flipkart through an HR-floated form on LinkedIn. The interview process consisted of four rounds.

Round-1 (Online Test)

This round comprised 3 coding questions, with a duration of 90 minutes, conducted on the SHL platform. All questions were based on graph and dynamic programming concepts. I cleared this round and received an email notification after 10 days.

Round-2 (PS/DS Round)

Approximately 10-12 days after the initial application, my first technical round was scheduled. I was asked two data structures and algorithms questions. I solved "Symmetric Tree" in about 15-20 minutes and "Maximal Square" in about 30 minutes. I received an email confirming my progression to the next round on the same day, with Round 3 scheduled for the following day.

Round-3 (PS/DS Round)

This round felt a bit tougher than the previous one, featuring three questions. I spent considerable time on "Minimum Number of Jumps to Reach End", detailing my thought process from a brute force approach to an optimized greedy solution. For "Square Root with Given Precision", where N was up to 10^18, the interviewer provided helpful hints, leading me to realize the binary search approach. The final question was "Sliding Window Maximum", which I had solved multiple times before. I was asked to provide an optimized solution directly and completed it in just 10 minutes. Within a few hours, I received a mail for the Hiring Manager round, which was initially scheduled for the same day but postponed to the next due to emergencies.

Round-4 (HM Round)

The Hiring Manager round lasted around 50 minutes. The discussion primarily revolved around my past internships, my favorite projects, and numerous behavioral questions.

Five days after this round, I received the selection mail.

I initiated my application for the SDE-1 position at Flipkart through a form circulated by their HR on LinkedIn.

Round 1 (Online Test)

The first stage was an online test on the SHL platform, lasting 90 minutes. It comprised three coding questions, primarily focusing on graph and dynamic programming problems. I passed this round and received a selection email after about 10 days, with the subsequent technical rounds scheduled shortly thereafter.

Round 2 (PS/DS Round)

This round involved two problem-solving questions. I managed to solve both, dedicating about 15-20 minutes to the first and around 30 minutes to the second. I received confirmation of clearing this round on the same day, with Round 3 scheduled for the very next day.

Round 3 (PS/DS Round)

Three questions were posed in this round. For the first question, I spent considerable time articulating my thought process, moving from a brute-force solution to an optimized greedy approach. For the second, despite initially proposing a less optimal solution, the interviewer's supportive guidance led me to realize and implement a binary search approach, given the high constraints. The third question was a standard problem that I had practiced extensively, allowing me to directly present the optimized solution and complete it in just 10 minutes.

A few hours later, I received an email informing me that my Hiring Manager (HM) round would be on the same day, though it was later postponed to the next day due to some work emergencies.

Round 4 (HM Round)

The HM round lasted about 50 minutes. The discussion centered around my internships, my favorite projects, and several behavioral questions.

Approximately five days after the HM round, I received the good news of my selection.

Overview

I recently interviewed with Flipkart for an SDE-2 role in June 2024. The process involved several technical rounds, and I felt confident about my performance in each. However, the subsequent HR communication (or lack thereof) left me in an ambiguous situation.

Machine Coding Round

This round was quite extensive, lasting about 2.5 to 3 hours. My task was to design a movie review system with specific functionalities. I believe this round went exceptionally well as I was not only able to meet the core requirements but also implemented some optional features, which seemed to impress the interviewer.

Following this, I received a call the very next morning, inviting me to the subsequent round.

Problem Solving / Data Structures & Algorithms Round

Scheduled for June 10th, this round focused on standard Data Structures and Algorithms questions. While I don't recall both problems asked, one of them was a classic LeetCode problem, Path Sum II. I felt confident about my approach and solution.

Once again, I received a call the next morning to proceed to the Design Round.

Design Round

In this round, I was challenged to design Spotify. The discussion covered both Low-Level Design (LLD) and High-Level Design (HLD) aspects, along with comprehensive scalability discussions. I managed to address almost all the questions effectively, though I did momentarily forget to mention Elasticsearch as a potential solution for the search implementation. Despite that minor slip, based on my answers and the interviewer's reactions, I felt this round also went very positively.

Post-Interview Experience

This is where the process took an unexpected turn. Unlike the previous rounds, I did not receive a call the next day. I initially assumed there might be a delay, perhaps due to scheduling for the next stage with a Hiring Manager. However, weeks passed, and I received no further communication whatsoever—no invitation for another interview, no formal rejection, nor any update on the job status.

I have made numerous attempts to contact the recruiters via calls, emails, and texts over the past two weeks, but all my efforts have been met with silence. I even tried reaching out to my Design Round interviewer on LinkedIn for some insight, but unfortunately, I was ghosted there as well. This has been my first experience of this nature, and I'm quite perplexed and disappointed by the lack of closure.

I applied for the SDE-1 role at Flipkart through an HR form circulated on LinkedIn. My interview process began with an online test that comprised three coding questions. After a waiting period of about 10-12 days, I received a selection email, and my first Problem Solving/Data Structures (PS/DS) round was scheduled. In this round, I was asked two coding questions: Symmetric Tree and Maximal Square. I managed to solve Symmetric Tree in about 15-20 minutes and Maximal Square in approximately 30 minutes. Following this, I quickly moved to the next PS/DS round, which took place the very next day. This round involved three questions: Minimum Number of Jumps to Reach End of a Given Array, Find Square Root of Number Up to Given Precision Using Binary Search (where the interviewer helped guide me towards the binary search approach, given the high constraints), and Sliding Window Maximum. I received an email within a few hours confirming I had cleared this round and would proceed to the Hiring Manager (HM) round. This round was initially postponed due to work emergencies but happened the following day, lasting about 50 minutes. It heavily focused on my internships, my favorite projects, and numerous behavioral questions. Five days later, I received my selection email, confirming the offer.

I successfully interviewed for the SDE-1 role at Flipkart as a 2024 graduate, which involved four distinct rounds, culminating in a selection offer.

Round-1 (Online Test): This round consisted of three coding questions. I received the selection mail for this round after 10 days, following which it took almost 10-12 days for the first round to actually happen.

Round-2 (PS/DS Round): This round took place the day after I cleared Round-1. Two questions were asked:

1. Symmetric Tree: I solved this question in about 15-20 minutes.
2. Maximal Square: I dedicated approximately 30 minutes to solving this problem.

On the very same day, I received a mail confirming that I had cleared both Round-1 and Round-2.

Round-3 (PS/DS Round): This round also happened the next day and involved three questions:

1. Minimum Number of Jumps to Reach End: I spent a considerable amount of time on this, discussing approaches from brute-force to an optimized greedy solution.
2. Find Square Root of Number Up to Given Precision Using Binary Search: The constraints for this problem were high. Initially, I was giving a normal solution, but the interviewer was very supportive and helped me realize that binary search was the appropriate method, which I then solved.
3. Sliding Window Maximum: This is a standard problem that I had solved many times. I was asked to directly provide the optimized approach, which I did in just 10 minutes.

A few hours after this round, I received an email informing me about an upcoming HM (Hiring Manager) round scheduled for the same day. However, it was postponed due to some work emergencies and eventually happened the following day.

Round-4 (HM Round): This round lasted around 50 minutes. I was primarily asked questions related to my internships, my favorite project, and numerous behavioral questions.

Finally, I received the selection mail after 5 days.

My interview journey for the SDE-2 role at Flipkart began in the first week of March 2024, culminating in an offer in April. I have 2.6 years of experience, and the entire process consisted of five rounds.

Round 1: Machine Coding/LLD (90 minutes)

This round was split into 30 minutes for problem statement discussion and 1 hour for coding. The task was to design an in-memory vehicle rental service, similar to Zoomcar, specifically for a single city with multiple branches. Key functional requirements included:

• Managing multiple branches, each with a limited number of different vehicle types.
• Booking vehicles for predefined 1-hour slots on a single day (00-59).
• Fixed pricing per vehicle.
• Features for onboarding new branches and vehicles.
• Renting a vehicle for a time slot and type (defaulting to the lowest price).
• Displaying available vehicles for a given branch.

The system had to be CLI-driven and utilize in-memory data structures, prohibiting any database usage. I was given 1 hour to code. My approach involved analyzing requirements to identify entities, then creating Model/POJO and DTO classes. I developed services and controllers for user interactions, prioritizing loose coupling and dependency injection. For persistence, I relied on Java Collections, ensuring thread safety (though optional). I implemented a minimal exception hierarchy and global exception handler. To optimize operations like vehicle booking (Requirement 3), I considered using a min-heap, accepting an overhead on vehicle insertion queries. For displaying available vehicles (Requirement 4), I overrode the toString method. I also applied design patterns like Factory (for vehicle generation), Strategy (for pricing), and Singleton (for managing thread-safe instances). Post-coding, I demoed the system with various use cases and answered questions on design patterns used, schema design, and database storage/query patterns.

Round 2: DSA/PSDS (60 minutes)

This round involved two LeetCode Medium problems.

1. The first problem was an overlapping interval scenario, which I approached using a line sweep algorithm.
2. The second problem was a standard tree question: "Print Level order traversal of a binary tree using Given Inorder and Preorder Traversal". I was required to provide a clean, compilable solution and explain my intuition clearly. I leveraged concepts like Sorting, TreeSet, Binary Trees, and Recursive Subproblems. Having solved around 120 medium problems on LeetCode, I found this round manageable.

Round 3: Design (LLD+HLD) (60 minutes)

I was asked to design BookMyShow. I began by gathering functional requirements and mapping out a user journey, which included searching for shows, selecting screenings and seats, proceeding to checkout, completing payments, and viewing tickets. I then designed APIs for each step, such as GET /shows/queryKeyword, GET /shows/selectSeats, POST /shows/confirm (which would acquire soft row locks), POST /shows/checkout, and GET /bookings/mybookings. I detailed how different objects would interact with these APIs, and how operations would be handled internally down to the database level. Critical discussions included managing concurrent seat bookings, failure scenarios, data store choices, race conditions, and resource contention. For the High-Level Design (HLD) part, I crunched numbers for user base, bandwidth, traffic, and storage requirements. I also discussed Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), sharding strategies, load balancing, and caching mechanisms.

Round 4: Techno-Managerial Round (60 minutes)

This round was with a Senior Engineering Manager and focused on my profile and past experience. I was asked to deep-dive into a specific project, discussing its problem statement, technical solution, business case, coding, and deployment. We explored alternative solutions, potential improvements, and enhancements. Since it was a microservices project, I explained its entire ecosystem. Questions also covered NFRs, high-level architecture, DevOps practices, pipelines, and deployment choices. My mention of Redis led to questions on Redis clustering and replication. Additionally, I faced scenario-based technical and behavioral questions, focusing on incident/bug handling, downtime issues, and ownership. The interviewer made me comfortable, allowing me to articulate my thoughts freely. The round concluded with a discussion about my career progression and role development.

Round 5: HM Connect

This was a casual discussion with the Hiring Manager, focusing on the technical ecosystem, Lines of Business (LOBs), team structure, and culture fitment. I asked several follow-up questions, and the manager provided clear insights into the organization's scale and engineering culture. We also touched upon individual progression and benefits.

Background

I am a 2023 CSE graduate from a Tier 2 college, with previous experience as an SDE intern at Amazon for 6 months. I applied off-campus for an SDE-1 position at Flipkart in February/March 2024, sending out numerous applications without a referral. I believe my Amazon internship played a significant role in getting shortlisted for the Online Assessment (OA).

Online Assessment: 3 Questions, 90 mins

The OA consisted of three questions which I found slightly difficult, primarily due to their confusing/poor wording. I managed to pass approximately 70% of the test cases overall.

PS/DS Interview 1: 45 mins

This round was solely focused on Data Structures and Algorithms, with no theoretical questions. The expectation was to explain all possible approaches in increasing efficiency, write code on a whiteboard, debug it, dry run, and thoroughly discuss the time and space complexity. I made sure to follow the advice from Flipkart's SDE Interview Guide on their website.

PS/DS Interview 2: 1 hour

This was another dedicated Data Structures and Algorithms round, focusing on more complex problem-solving.

Hiring Manager/Culture Fit Round: 30 mins

This round felt more like a discussion than a typical interview. I was prepared to showcase qualities relevant to Flipkart. We started with introductions, then discussed my reasons for choosing Flipkart over other companies, what I liked and disliked about their app/website, various situational questions, feedback I had received from my previous manager, what I would change about my previous company, and what would make me consider leaving a job.

Overall Thoughts & Feelings

The entire interview process was quite rigorous, certainly more challenging than my Amazon intern interview. I found all the interviewers to be very pleasant, well-spoken, and encouraging. They clearly explained their expectations, were happy to answer my questions, and allowed me to make mistakes and correct them without feeling judged. None of them spoke down to me, which was a refreshing change compared to some previous startup interviews. The process was also very fast, with all interviews conducted on continuous days, starting just four days after the OA. I received the result on the same day as the HM round.

My off-campus interview experience for an SDE-1 role at Flipkart in Bangalore started with a pre-screening round focused on problem-solving and data structures. I am a new graduate with a B.Tech in IT from a Tier 1 college. The process comprised three rounds.

Pre-screening Round 1 (1 hour) - Problem Solving/Data Structures

This round had two interviewers. After initial introductions, I was given two LeetCode problems:

1. Jump Game II: I was expected to solve this problem with an O(n) time complexity.
2. Put Marbles in a Bag: This was another LeetCode problem I had to solve.

Pre-screening Round 2 (45 minutes) - Problem Solving/Data Structures

In the second technical round, after introductions, I faced two more problems:

1. A custom problem where I had to determine connectivity between N computers given connections and answer q queries.
2. Binary Tree Maximum Path Sum: This was a standard LeetCode problem.

Hiring Manager Interview (30 minutes)

The final round was with the Hiring Manager. This round was more about conceptual knowledge and behavioral aspects:

1. Questions on Computer Networking topics, specifically the OSI Model and Network Layer.
2. Detailed inquiries about my Internship Experience, focusing on API calls (GET and POST methods) as mentioned in my resume.
3. Motivations for joining Flipkart: "Why Flipkart?"
4. Discussion about my strengths and weaknesses.
5. An explanation of my career transition from my father's business venture to pursuing an SDE role, addressing a two-month period of uncertainty.

I successfully navigated all rounds and received an offer.

During my SDE 2 interview at Flipkart, I was presented with a machine coding round named FLIPMED. The core task was to design and implement an application that allows patients to connect with doctors and book appointments. The system needed to manage time slots, doctor availability, patient registrations, and appointment bookings/cancellations. Key features included registering doctors with specialties, doctors declaring their 60-minute slot availabilities, and patients searching for and booking appointments based on specialty. Patients could book multiple appointments but not with different doctors in the same time slot. Both parties also needed to view their scheduled appointments. The problem also included bonus requirements such as appointment cancellation and implementing different ranking strategies for displaying available slots and doctors, allowing for future extensions like doctor ratings. I was instructed to use in-memory data structures, avoid a UI, and demonstrate functionality through a driver class with test cases. The code was expected to be modular, readable, extensible, testable, and have proper error handling.

Hey Everyone, I'm Apreksha Mathur. I'm excited to share my interview experience for the Software Development Engineer 1 role at Flipkart. You can connect with me on LinkedIn.

My interview process consisted of three rounds:

Round 1 (PS/DS1)

• Trapping Rain Water
• Partition Equal Subset Sum

Round 2 (PS/DS2)

• Group Anagrams Together
• Capacity To Ship Packages Within D Days

Round 3 (Hiring Manager)

1. My projects: I talked about the projects I've worked on, the tech stacks I used, and the structural approaches I followed.
2. Team-based projects: The manager asked general questions regarding my experience with team projects.
3. Why Flipkart: I explained my motivations and reasons for wanting to join Flipkart.
4. Why leave my previous company: I discussed my reasons for seeking a new opportunity.

Verdict – Selected

I interviewed at Flipkart for an SDE2 Backend role in August 2023. The entire process was quite fast, taking just one week from application to offer acceptance.

Application Process

I applied through a referral after spotting the job posting on their careers page. My friend of a friend helped with the referral, and the very next day, HR called me to inform me that my resume had been shortlisted. They explained the full interview process, emphasizing that this position needed to be closed quickly, which meant there wasn't much time for preparation.

The interview consisted of four rounds:

• Round 1: Machine Coding
• Round 2: Data Structure and Algorithm / Problem Solving
• Round 3: High-Level Design (HLD) and Low-Level Design (LLD)
• Round 4: Hiring Manager

Interview Process

Round 1 - Machine Coding

This round was scheduled the day after my resume was shortlisted. It lasted 2.5 hours, broken down into 30 minutes for problem explanation and clarification, 1.5 hours for coding, and 30 minutes for code walkthrough and inspection. During the problem explanation phase, I made sure to clarify all potential use cases. The problem involved 6-7 entities, and I focused on writing modular code with proper error handling and logging, ensuring all expected cases worked.

In the code evaluation segment, the interviewer probed my thought process behind each design decision. It was crucial that my code was runnable and easy to debug, as they asked me to implement a new feature, and my code allowed for minimal changes. I received strong positive feedback within 15 minutes of the interview.

Round 2 - DSA / Problem Solving

This 1-hour round took place the day after Round 1 and involved two DSA problems. I successfully solved the first problem with running code and provided a working solution for the second, discussing further optimizations. This resulted in "Good hire" feedback.

Round 3 - Design Round (LLD & HLD)

Again, this round was scheduled for the very next day. A popular design problem was presented. I discussed the database schema, the high-level design encompassing all services and their responsibilities, and argued why a microservice architecture would be preferable over a monolith for the given use case. We also covered concurrency issues and their handling.

The interviewer delved deeply into my knowledge, asking in-depth questions about Redis, such as how its cluster scales, how replication works internally, what happens during failures, how to prevent them, and how to ensure consistency. Similar detailed questions were posed regarding MongoDB. The final 15 minutes were dedicated to discussing my current company project, its HLD and LLD, my major contributions, tools used, and how scalability and load testing were handled. I received "Strong hire" feedback for my performance, especially on the HLD questions.

Round 4 - Hiring Manager

This round began with a basic introduction and a discussion of my current projects, focusing on my major contributions and their impact on the product. Following standard HM questions, I used the remaining 25 minutes (and even an extra 5 minutes past the scheduled end) to ask extensively about the team, its structure, system architecture, and how teams collaborate. The HM was very patient and happy to answer all my inquiries. I received "Strong hire" feedback from this round as well.

The HR called me the very next day to confirm my qualification and informed me that they were rolling out the offer. I received and accepted the offer by the end of the day.

I successfully interviewed for the SDE-1 role at Flipkart through an off-campus drive I found via LinkedIn. My interview process was structured into three main rounds, culminating in an offer.

Round 1: Machine Round - Bowling Alley

This round was designed to assess my object-oriented programming (OOPs) concepts and language proficiency, focusing on my ability to write modular and well-structured code. The problem presented was to design a scoring system for a bowling alley.

I was provided with all the specific rules, including how to handle strikes and spares. My task was to calculate the score based on the pins knocked down and to correctly incorporate bonus scores for strikes and spares. The evaluation criteria for this round were stringent:

• Demo-able code
• Functional correctness
• Code readability
• Usage of design patterns, where applicable
• Language proficiency
• Parameterized code (rather than hardcoded values)
• Thorough testing
• Proper exception handling

Round 2: Data Structures & Algorithms Round

This round began with a brief introduction, and the interviewer immediately informed me that I would be given two questions to solve within one hour. The approach suggested was to first articulate a naive or brute-force solution, and then progressively optimize it.

The two problems I was asked were:

1. Set Matrix Zeroes
2. Car Pooling

Round 3: Manager Interview

The final round was a manager interview, which focused on my professional experience, technical background, and motivations.

The questions covered were:

1. An explanation of my current company, including drawing an architectural diagram of how its systems operate.
2. A detailed description of my team and my specific role within it.
3. Discussion about the technologies I am currently working on.
4. My reasons for wanting to join Flipkart.
5. My motivations for wanting to leave my current company.

My overall verdict after these rounds was SELECTED!

I was recently contacted by a recruiter from Instahyre for an SDE 2 position at Flipkart. My interview journey started with a Machine Coding round that lasted 90 minutes for coding and 30 minutes for a demo. The task was to build a property booking site, similar to Magicbricks or Housing.com. I had to implement core features such as adding new properties for sale, allowing users to view their listings, shortlisting interesting properties, and incorporating search/sort functionalities based on criteria like price range and location. It was crucial to demonstrate a working solution, cover all requirements, write extensible code using design patterns, and handle edge cases.

Next, I had a Coding Round for 60 minutes, conducted by Interview Vector. I faced one medium-level and one hard-level LeetCode problem. I successfully provided a complete solution and code for the medium problem, which involved Binary Search. For the hard problem, focused on AVL Trees, I presented my approach and partial code.

The third round was an LLD (Low-Level Design), also 60 minutes and conducted by Interview Vector. I was tasked with designing a parking lot. My approach involved gathering requirements, then presenting a detailed design for an MVP, including all necessary entities, interfaces, ensuring separation of concerns, utilizing design patterns where appropriate, and outlining the detailed flow logic.

Finally, I proceeded to the Hiring Manager round, which surprisingly concluded in about 30 minutes, instead of the allotted 60. This round primarily focused on discussing my past projects and professional experience. I also answered standard behavioral questions, such as my motivations for joining Flipkart and how I manage conflicts in a work environment. Ultimately, I received an offer from Flipkart.

My Journey from Rejections to Multiple Offers

Hi LeetCode Community,

This post chronicles my journey from numerous rejections to finally securing multiple offers. Starting my full-time career in July 2019 after completing my B.E. in CS, I began looking for a switch after realizing my skills weren't being utilized effectively in my previous role. For 2.5 years, I faced continuous setbacks, undergoing over 50 interviews and countless rejections.

Interview Experiences:

Interview 1: ClearTax - SDE1 (Feb 2019) - Rejected

A recruiter contacted me via Instahyre. The first round was a Machine Coding Round where I had to design and implement Sudoku using Object-Oriented Programming Principles, which I successfully completed. The next round was a review of my approach. In the third round, I was asked two DSA questions: Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock II (which I solved) and Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock IV (which I discussed, but couldn't solve completely). I was rejected after this round.

Interview 2: Udaan - Software Engineer 1 (April 2019) - Rejected

I was shortlisted after participating in a HackerEarth challenge. The first round was a Machine Coding Round where I was asked to implement Splitwise with OOPs Principles, which I was able to solve. After a review, HR informed me they were looking for someone with more experience, leading to another rejection.

Interview 3: Amazon - SDE1 (June 2019) - Rejected

I passed a HackerEarth challenge by solving both questions, which led to onsite rounds in Bengaluru. In a pen/paper round, I was given two questions: Sliding Window Maximum and counting the number of Binary Search Trees present in a given binary tree. I was able to solve both of them. Despite this, I was rejected, with HR stating I did not pass this round, without further explanation.

Interview 4: GE HealthCare - Software Developer (June 2019) - Rejected

After successfully completing an online HackerEarth test, I received a call for an onsite interview. Interview Round 1 involved questions on networking, OS, DBMS fundamentals, followed by a DP problem. We then had an in-depth discussion about my internship project, and I was asked C++ questions like virtual pointers, virtual destructors, virtual functions, and other OOPS concepts. Overall, this round did not go well, and I was rejected.

Interview 5: DE Shaw - Associate Developer - Life Sciences (June 2019) - Rejected

I applied through their careers website and subsequently received an email for an online assessment on HackerRank. I was able to solve all 3 coding questions and almost all 15 MCQs. A week later, I got a call for onsite interviews. Round 1 involved one coding question based on DP and questions on design patterns (factory, singleton, builder). Round 2 was a DSA round with two interviewers, where I was asked Trapping Rain Water II (couldn't solve) and Move Zeroes (solved). I was rejected after this round.

Interview 6: Amazon - SDE1 (October 2019) - Rejected

I applied through an employee referral and received an online assessment link. The online assessment had 2 medium-hard questions based on DP and graphs, which I solved, leading to an onsite invitation after 2 weeks. Round 1 was with an SDE-2, who asked me two coding problems: Rotting Oranges and Kth Largest Element in an Array. I solved both. Round 2, also a DSA round with an SDE-2, involved two coding problems: finding the minimum number of platforms required for a railway station given arrival/departure times, and Jump Game II. I was able to solve both. Round 3 was with an SDM, focusing on my projects and Amazon Leadership Principles. Round 4, also with an SDM, covered my internship projects, Amazon Leadership Principles, and one coding question on Trees. I solved the coding question. Overall, this round went well. I was told they would contact me within a week, but I never received any email or feedback.

Interview 7: Unacademy - SDE1 (October 2019) - Rejected

A recruiter contacted me after seeing my profile on Naukri, and I was called for an onsite interview the following week. Round 1 was a test link with 3 easy-medium questions, which I solved. Round 2 was a DSA round with one backtracking question and one graph question, both medium-hard, which I solved. Round 3 was a mix of coding and technical knowledge, covering my projects, C++, REST architecture, and two coding questions (one on trees, one on DP), which I solved. Round 4 was purely theoretical, with many questions on networking, OS, DBMS, and my projects. Round 5 was a normal, more behavioral discussion with one of the co-founders. HR informed me the next day that I was not selected.

Interview 8: PharmEasy - SDE1 (October 2019) - Rejected

I received an interview request from HR at PharmEasy on TopHire. Round 1 was a DSA round with two questions: reverse a stack using recursion, and reverse a linked list in groups of a given size. I solved both. Round 2 was also a DSA round, where a backtracking question (a variation on the N-Queens Problem) was asked. I was not able to solve this question, and consequently, I was rejected after this round.

After these interviews, my profile struggled to get shortlisted, and I didn't receive calls after online assessments for about 4-5 months.

Interview 10: Amazon - SDE1 (December 2020) - Rejected

I applied again through an employee referral and received an online assessment link after two weeks. The online assessment had two questions, one related to custom sorting and the other a priority queue-based question, which I solved. I was called for a virtual onsite after three weeks. Round 1 involved two coding questions, one based on DP and Sort Colors; I solved both. Round 2, another DSA round, had two questions: Flatten a Multilevel Doubly Linked List and Integer to Roman; I solved both. Round 3 was with an SDM from Seattle, focusing on Amazon Leadership Principles and ending with one coding problem. After these rounds, I was told one more round would be taken, but I never received any feedback.

Interview 11: Grab - SDE1 (February 2021) - Rejected

I applied via the career portal for a Software Engineer backend role and received a test link to complete within 3 days. The online assessment had 3 medium-hard questions, all of which I solved, leading to an onsite call after 3 weeks. Round 1 had two coding questions: Next Permutation and LRU Cache, both of which I solved. Round 2, another PS/DSA Round, had two coding questions: House Robber and a graph-based problem, which I also solved. Round 3 was a system design round, where I was asked to design a Restaurant booking system that handles concurrency. We had a discussion, but this round did not go well. I was rejected after this round.

Interview 25: Turvo - Associate Software Engineer (March 2021) - Offer :)

I completed a HackerRank test with 3 easy-medium questions. Round 2 was a DSA round with two questions, one DP-based and the other related to Trees. Round 3 was a mixture of DSA and discussions about my past projects. Round 4 was the Hiring Manager round, which involved a normal discussion based on my experience, OOPS, and some behavioral questions. I received an offer!

Interview 26: Goldman Sachs - Software Engineer (April 2021) - Rejected

I applied via an employee referral and received an online assessment link two weeks later. The online assessment had 2 easy-medium questions, which I solved, leading to an onsite call three weeks after this round. Round 1 was a DSA round with two questions: one a variation of the Trapping Rain Water Problem, and the second based on Trees. I was able to solve both. Round 2 was also a DSA round with two questions: Minimum Add to Make Parentheses Valid (solved) and Word Ladder (I came up with an approach but couldn't complete the code due to time restrictions). I was rejected after this round.

Interview 27: Google - Software Engineer (March 2021) - Rejected

I applied via an employee referral and was rejected after a phone interview.

Interview 28: Housing - Software Engineer (April 2021) - Rejected

A consulting company contacted me regarding an opportunity after finding my profile on Naukri. I was called for an onsite interview after two weeks. Round 1 was a DSA round with two medium-hard DP problems. Round 2 was a mix of technical, databases, projects, and coding problems. Round 3 was the Hiring Manager round, where he asked me about my projects, in-depth questions on indexing in DBMS, and some MySQL queries. After that, he asked me two coding questions: Excel Sheet Column Number and Valid Parentheses. This round did not go well as I struggled to answer the in-depth questions on indexing, although I was able to solve both coding problems. I was rejected after this round.

Interview 29: Flipkart - SDE1 (April-May 2021) - Offer - Accepted :)

I applied via an employee referral and received a call after three weeks from HR regarding onsite rounds. Round 1 was a Machine Coding round, where the question was to design a Covid-19 Vaccination Center Booking system. This was followed by a review round regarding my approach and cross-questions based on my implementation. Round 2 was a DSA Round with two questions: Number of Islands and a modification of the Coin Change problem. I was able to solve both of them. Round 3 was the Hiring Manager Round, where he asked me in-depth questions about my current projects and some behavioral questions. One week later, HR called me to extend an offer, stating that my interview feedback was positive. Finally, after two years of persistent effort, I received an offer!

Interview 30: Amazon - SDE1 (May 2021) - Offer :)

This was my fifth time interviewing with Amazon. This time, after completing four rounds, I was informed that they would be extending an offer to me.

I will be joining Flipkart next week :)