🟡 How I Cracked Blinkit's SDE-1 Interview! 🟡
Summary
I successfully navigated Blinkit's SDE-1 interview process, which consisted of a DSA round, a System Design round, and a Hiring Manager round focused on Kafka. I received and accepted an offer the same day.
Full Experience
Just a few days ago, I wrapped up one of the most exciting interview processes I’ve ever been part of — and today, I'm thrilled to share that I've accepted an offer from Blinkit as an SDE-1! 🚀
Total years of experience - 2.3 years.
Blinkit’s interview process is short, crisp, and focused — just 3 rounds:
- DSA Round
- System Design
- Hiring Manager Round
Here’s a breakdown of my experience 👇
⚙️ Round 1: DSA + Kafka Curiosity
The interview started off with the interviewer spotting Kafka multiple times in my resume (and rightly so, I’ve worked extensively on it). This sparked a discussion around:
- How I used Kafka in my previous projects
- How I handled fault tolerance, load balancing, and failures
- Real-world use cases I built around it
Then came the DSA part — a story-based problem that was a blend of House Robber II + Combination Sum. I walked through both recursive and memoized approaches, and the interviewer was happy with the way I structured and explained my thought process.
🛠️ Round 2: System Design
This was taken by an SDE-3 who was deep into systems thinking. He gave me an open-ended but realistic problem:
Design a system that can collect credentials from multiple financial apps, scrape data, process it, and generate analytics for both users and admins.
As we discussed, he dynamically added admin-level analysis to the requirements — and I had to adapt the architecture on the fly. It was tricky but fun!
⚠️ Pro Tip: Practice using tools like draw.io or Alphine beforehand — I usually use whiteboards but had to quickly adapt during the call.
We extended beyond time as I kept pitching scalable ideas (analytics with pie charts, generic services, etc.). That persistence paid off — we ended up discussing:
- Elasticsearch and inverted indexes
- Database tradeoffs
- Master-slave setups and caching strategies
The interviewer appreciated the effort and told me, "You had misses, but you didn’t give up — that’s what mattered." ❤️
👨💼 Round 3: Hiring Manager (but it felt like a Kafka deep-dive)
Expected a cultural fit round? Well, surprise! The manager saw Kafka again on my resume and deep-dived into real-world async problems Blinkit is facing right now while processing orders.
We discussed:
- Async order processing challenges
- Kafka optimization strategies
- Frontend checks + backend resilience
- Scenarios I handled in production
He ended by saying:
"Kafka is our backbone, and your understanding of it is solid. I’m impressed."
💬 We even touched on comp discussion at the end — but more on that in a separate post 😉
✨ Same day offer. Offer accepted. I’m super excited to be joining Blinkit and can’t wait to build impactful systems with the team!
If you’re preparing for interviews or working with Kafka, feel free to drop a comment or message — always happy to chat tech 💬
#blinkit #interviewexperience #sde1 #kafka #systemdesign #softwareengineering #careerjourney #offeraccepted
Interview Questions (3)
A story-based problem that was a blend of House Robber II + Combination Sum.
Design a system that can collect credentials from multiple financial apps, scrape data, process it, and generate analytics for both users and admins. During the discussion, admin-level analysis was dynamically added to the requirements, requiring on-the-fly adaptation of the architecture.
Deep-dive discussion into real-world async problems Blinkit is facing while processing orders. Topics included: Async order processing challenges, Kafka optimization strategies, Frontend checks + backend resilience, and Scenarios I handled in production.
Preparation Tips
For System Design, I found it beneficial to practice using tools like draw.io or Alphine beforehand, as I typically use whiteboards and had to quickly adapt during the call.