Software engineering salaries

Background: I graduated from a Tier 3 college (CSE) and have 1 year of internship experience at a travel-tech company, working on backend APIs with Spring Boot, AWS, Redis, and SQL. Offer Details: I received a Backend Engineer offer for 12 LPA (CTC). Interview Process: Round 1 (DSA): Two medium-level tree-based coding problems (Construct Binary Tree from Traversals, Lowest Common Ancestor / Boundary Traversal type). Round 2 (System Design): I designed Splitwise, focusing on class design, efficient balance calculation, data consistency, scalability, REST API endpoints, and DB schema. Round 3 (Managerial): I was asked to implement HashMap core logic and collision handling; we discussed project ownership, debugging, and teamwork. Round 4 (VP Round): We had a deep dive into my projects (architecture, challenges, impact), and I answered SQL questions (joins, aggregation, optimization) and discussed cloud exposure (AWS, caching, monitoring). Tech Stack Used: Java, Spring Boot, MySQL, Redis, AWS, JUnit, RestAssured. Preparation Strategy: I solved 150+ LeetCode problems (Trees, Graphs, DP) for DSA, watched videos from CodeKarle and Gaurav Sen for System Design, reviewed Java Fundamentals (Collections, Multithreading, JVM), and focused on explaining scalability and data flow for my projects. Key Takeaways: Tree questions are common for backend interviews; it's crucial to have one strong project I can explain end-to-end; I learned to be clear on API and database design, and confidence and communication are as important as coding skills.

Backend SDE1 role Location: Noida (can commute from home) Aligns with long-term career path Higher base salary compared to BrowserStack