Groww SDE-II | Bengaluru | April'25

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groww
SDE-IIBengaluru3.83 years
April 24, 20256 reads

Summary

I recently interviewed for an SDE-II position at Groww in Bengaluru in April 2025. My experience included three rounds: Data Structures & Algorithms, Machine Coding, and High-Level Design, ultimately resulting in a rejection.

Full Experience

🚀 Hey folks! After sharing my SDE-2 interview experience at Amazon (and receiving some really positive feedback 🙌), I thought I’d drop another one here — this time from a recent interview with Groww.

Hope you find it helpful — and as always, would love to hear your thoughts and feedback! Let’s dive in 👇

🎓 Background: B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from one of the Top 10 IITs 10 months at a Big Service-based MNC 3 years in a Product-Based Company Current Role: SDE-II in Product Based Company

🧠 Round 1: DSA Duration: 1 Hour Problem: Topological sort — Jobs represented as strings, Graph was disconnected and had cycles. Goal: Print all jobs to be done before a given job. ✅ Solved in 45 mins ✅ Ran multiple test cases — all passed 🎯 Smooth ride.

💻 Round 2: Machine Coding Duration: 2 Hours Task: Build a scalable cache (end-to-end) only this statement was the problem & I was supposed to assume things by myself. Implemented features:- add, contains, invalidate, validate, setMaxSize, fetchSize, printMap, Eviction logic via queue (FIFO). Hardcoded test data to verify functionality.

🔍 After 1.5 hrs, the interviewer joined. Code worked fine, but...

💬 Feedback:

“This isn’t scalable. FIFO isn’t enough — what if we want different eviction logic?”

✅ I explained how to make it scalable using interfaces 😕 Still didn’t seem impressed.

🏗️ Round 3: High-Level Design Duration: 1 Hour Task: Design a Stock Market System to handle: Events: buy, sell, stop-loss Incoming via queue, with 10ms SLA & we have to place the order within that time. 📌 Discussed:- Sharding, Indexing, Partitioning, Caching Happy flows, retries, failure handling, schedulers

👎 Feedback (a week later):

“Basic implementation — didn’t extend to multi-exchange/segment support. Needed more focus on scalability.” It seemed the Machine Coding round didn’t fully meet the interviewer’s expectations, which may have impacted the final decision during the debrief.

😅 Verdict: Rejection #13 in the past year 🥲 Added proudly to my growing “Hall of Fame: Close but No Offer” wall 😂

Still learning. Still building. Still growing. 💪 If you’ve faced something similar — you’re not alone. Let’s keep pushing!

Link for my Amazon SDE-II Experience :- https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6654251/amazon-l5-sde-ii-april25-hyderabad-by-a2-umh1/comments/2959468/

Interview Questions (3)

Q1
Topological Sort for Dependent Jobs
Data Structures & AlgorithmsMedium

Jobs are represented as strings in a graph, which can be disconnected and contain cycles. The goal is to print all jobs that must be completed before a given job.

Q2
Scalable Cache Implementation
Data Structures & AlgorithmsHard

Build a scalable cache end-to-end. I was expected to assume necessary details myself. The interviewer's feedback indicated that FIFO wasn't sufficient for scalability and different eviction logics were needed.

Q3
Design a Stock Market System
System DesignHard

Design a Stock Market System capable of handling events like buy, sell, and stop-loss. These events arrive via a queue, and the system must place the order within a 10ms SLA. Feedback included a need for multi-exchange/segment support and more focus on scalability beyond basic implementation.

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