My Interview Experience at Coupa Software for ASDE (FTE 2026)

I appeared for Coupa Software – Associate Software Engineer (FTE 2026).

The process consisted of 1 OA and 3 interview rounds, all interviews conducted on the same day.

Online Assessment (OA)

The OA had two sections:

• 3 coding questions based on arrays, strings, sorting, and mapping, to be solved in 45 minutes
• 8 logical reasoning questions on patterns, graphs, etc., to be solved in 15 minutes

After around 3 days, the interview rounds were scheduled.

L1 Round

(Taken by an interviewer with ~3.5 years of experience)

This round was majorly focused on DSA. The topics and questions were decided by the interviewer.

There were 4–5 DSA questions to be solved in 1 hour (my round lasted around 1 hour 20 minutes).

Questions asked:

• Merge sort logic with pseudo code
• Reverse a string
• Remove duplicates from an array
• In-order traversal of a BST using a stack
• Longest substring with no repeating characters

There was also a short discussion about my work experience.

L2 Round

(Taken by an interviewer with 15+ years of experience)

This round started around 10 minutes after L1 and mainly focused on:

• Previous internship
• Projects
• CS fundamentals

We started with introductions. I was asked about my work during my previous internship, the challenges I faced, and a deeper understanding of my role and responsibilities.

Then we moved to a detailed theoretical discussion on my projects:

• High-level schema and workflow
• What I implemented
• What I would improve or work on in the future

Later, I was asked about my favorite subject and hobbies. I mentioned Computer Networks, which led to questions like:

• DNS explained in depth
• Flow of a URL shortener
• How it works and why
• What a URL comprises of (protocol, domain name, route, query)

Some generic CN questions followed.

This round felt more like a discussion and debate rather than an interview. I honestly told what I knew and what I didn’t.

Duration: ~1 hour

L3 Round

(Taken by an interviewer with 20+ years of industry experience)

This round started after another 10-minute gap and lasted around 1 hour 40 minutes.

We began with:

• Basic introduction
• Discussion about my work experience and projects
• How my day had been so far

Then we moved into an in-depth discussion of my project, followed by a High-Level Design (HLD) question:

Design an API Gateway

I was asked to:

• Design various components and entities
• Estimate the number of schemas required (roughly)

This lasted around 40 minutes, with several follow-up scenarios:

• What if Redis goes down?
• What if the logging worker goes down?
• What happens in the celebrity problem?
• How would you invalidate cache if the service is hosted on the cloud and IPs change frequently?

He seemed happy with my approach.

After that, we moved to DSA (Trees). Around 5–6 questions were asked, where I had to code only the solution function and dry run it.

Questions included:

• DFS vs BFS (advantages and disadvantages)
• Calculate the number of edges to reach a key
• Maximum height of a tree
• Minimum height of a tree
• Sum of all heights from the root nodes of a BST
• How to calculate LCA of two nodes

Most questions were linked, so updating the existing code was enough to solve them.

Finally, there were some general questions:

• About my family Why I chose IIIT Nagpur (CSE) over NIT (non-IT branch) or Gen-3 IIT with a lower branch

I answered honestly: I enjoy building systems, writing code, solving problems daily, and reading tech articles, which was clearly reflected in my projects.

He said he was happy with the discussion and asked me to wait for the recruiter.