Groww SDE Intern Interview Experience
Summary
I went through a three‑round on‑campus interview at Groww for a backend SDE intern role, covering DSA coding, project discussion, and system design/HR questions.
Full Experience
Recently appeared for the **Groww on-campus interview**
Role: SDE (backend)
College : VIT-AP
The interview process had 3 rounds:
- Round 1 - DSA
- Round 2 - Projects + Core Subjects
- Round 3 - HR + System Design
Here’s how each round went.
Round 1 - DSA
Duration: ~1 hour Format: Live coding Questions: 2
The round started with a basic introduction, and then the interviewer shared the links to the problems that I had to solve.
Q1. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock II
LeetCode - Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock II
Difficulty : medium
Q2. Candy
Difficulty : hard
I was asked to explain my approach and dry run on a few testcases
Round 2 - Projects Discussion + Core Subjects
Duration: ~40 minutes
This round started with an introduction to the projects I had mentioned in the resume.
Some of the questions were:
- Explain the database schema of your project.
- Why did you choose this particular tech stack?
- Why did you choose a NoSQL database?
- How did you prevent race conditions?
- How does the overall architecture work?
- How does one component communicate with another?
For around the first 20 minutes or so, the discussion was mostly around the database design, architecture and implementation details of the projects. I was also asked for a few SQL queries based on different scenarios from the project.
The project discussion ended up covering quite a few OOPS and DBMS concepts as well.
Then the interviewer moved towards some real-world scenarios.
For example: How would you implement a payment feature where a user could have different types of discounts — coupons, credit card discounts, etc.?
After that, there were a few questions from Computer Networks and Operating Systems.
Round 3 - HR + System Design
Duration: ~50 minutes
This round started with the usual questions:
- Tell me about yourself.
- Tell me about your college.
- Tell me about your academics.
Then we went back to the projects. Again, the discussion went kinda deep into the implementation details.
Some of the questions were:
- Explain the OTP lifecycle in your project.
- How would you handle multiple users?
- How did you ensure concurrency?
- How did you implement chats in your project?
- How does the system behave when multiple requests arrive simultaneously?
And there were quite a few follow-up questions for each of these.
System Design
There was also a basic system design question:
How would you design an Event Management System?
The discussion included things like:
- Overall architecture
- Entities
- APIs
- Database
- Concurrency
- Transactional functionality
The interviewer also asked me to explain the transactional functionality in detail, followed by a few scenario-based questions and follow-ups.
HR Questions
Some of the questions were:
- What is your strongest domain in tech?
- Rate yourself in your strongest domain out of 5.
- What is your weakest domain in tech?
- Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years, technically and non-technically?
- Why Groww?
- What's your dream company?
- How would you deal with disputes within a team?
And, there were follow-ups for almost every answer.
That was my Groww on-campus interview experience :)
Interview Questions (4)
Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock II
Given an array of stock prices, compute the maximum profit you can achieve. You may complete as many transactions as you like (i.e., buy one and sell one share of the stock multiple times). You must sell the stock before you buy again.
Candy
There are N children standing in a line, each with a rating. Distribute candies to each child such that each child gets at least one candy, and children with a higher rating than their immediate neighbours get more candies than those neighbours. Minimize the total number of candies distributed.
Design an Event Management System
Design a system for managing events, covering overall architecture, entities, APIs, database schema, concurrency handling, and transactional functionality. Discuss how the system would handle creating, updating, and querying events, user registrations, ticketing, and notifications.
Payment Feature with Multiple Discount Types
Implement a payment feature that supports various discount mechanisms such as coupons, credit‑card discounts, and promotional offers. Explain how you would model discount entities, apply them atomically during a transaction, and ensure correct calculation of final payable amount.