Flipkart || SDE 2 || Rejected
Summary
I completed five interview rounds for an SDE 2 position at Flipkart, including coding assessments, machine‑coding, system design, and a hiring‑manager interview, but was ultimately rejected.
Full Experience
YOE: 3.2 Company : Product base comapany Current Role : SDE - 2
Round 0 - Found the job opening on LinkedIn and applied through the Google Form provided.
Round 1 - Online Assessment - March 3rd Week :
- 90 mins window time.
- LC style question.
- Able to solve them in 45 mins
- Find Median from Data Stream : https://leetcode.com/problems/find-median-from-data-stream/description/
- The Earliest Moment When Everyone Become Friends https://leetcode.com/problems/the-earliest-moment-when-everyone-become-friends/
Round 2a - Machine Coding Discussion (30 mins) - March 3rd Week :
- Around 30 people joined the google meet
- The panel member explained the problem statement and addressed all the doubts raised by the participants.
- Problem : https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/1701772/flipkart-machine-coding-sde1-gym-managme-a6ay/
- The solution was expected to demonstrate good object-oriented design by incorporating relevant design patterns and adhering to SOLID principles.
- I was able to complete all the mandatory requirements but did not have enough time to work on the bonus questions.
A recruiter from Cleartrip coordinated and scheduled all the interview rounds. Since I expected the opportunity to be with Cleartrip, But at HM round i was introduced to different product team.
Round 2b - Machine Coding Evalaution (30 mins) - May 1st week :
- Discussed the problem statement and the solution I had implemented
- Discussed the design patterns I had used in the solution.
- Asked a few questions and requested me to modify certain parts of the code.
- Discussed a few DSA-related approaches that could have been used to solve the problem, including possible optimizations and the choice of appropriate data structures.
- Briefly explained bonus question implemenation.
Feedback from HR: Positive – Scheduled my next Design Round.
Round 3 - System Design : (60 mins) - May 2nd Week:
- Question: Design platform like Leetcode.
- Functional requirement : List problem, Code submission and results , Contest and Live dashboard
- Non Functional requirement, Schema design, API design and HLD .
- Interview got extent to 30 mins more, and had to draw some HLD design and deep derive based on it. Asked few queries to write.
- This was my first HLD round, did Average . Was able to answer most of the questions .
- Used Google doc to write all the requeitong and schema and for HLD used https://excalidraw.com/
Feedback from HR: Positive – Scheduled my next PSDS round.
Round 4 - PSDS : (60 mins) - May Last Week:
- LC style question.
- Min heap based quetions
- Binary Tree Maximum Path Sum : https://leetcode.com/problems/binary-tree-maximum-path-sum/description/
- Able to solve them easily.
Feedback from HR: Positive – Scheduled my next HM round.
Round 5 - HM : (60 mins) - June 1st Week:
- HM expalined about the porduct shopsy.
- Asked about my current company, its domain, and the various technologies, platforms, and tech stacks used within the organization.
- Discussed the current project I was working on.
- I was asked to draw the high-level components of the system and explain my work and contributions.
- Asked about the production issues I had faced .
- Discussed whether the existing architecture could be improved further and explored possible enhancements.
- The interview concluded within 45 minutes.
- I did lot of contribution in my current project, and i was not able to articulate my contributions effectively during the interview.
Feedback from HR: Rejected.
Interview Questions (5)
Find Median from Data Stream
LeetCode problem to design a data structure that supports adding numbers and retrieving the median in O(log n) time.
The Earliest Moment When Everyone Become Friends
LeetCode problem to determine the earliest timestamp when all users become connected in a social network.
Gym Management System (Machine Coding)
Machine‑coding problem discussed in the Flipkart interview, requiring an object‑oriented design following SOLID principles and appropriate design patterns.
Design Platform Like Leetcode
System design problem: design a platform similar to Leetcode, covering functional requirements (problem listing, code submission, contest dashboard) and non‑functional requirements (schema design, API design, high‑level architecture).
Binary Tree Maximum Path Sum
LeetCode problem to find the maximum sum of any path in a binary tree, where a path may start and end at any nodes.