HSBC TSE Interview Experience | FTE | 2 OAs + Technical + HR 🎉 NIT Bhopal

HSBC Interview Experience | TSE (Software Engineer) | FTE

Finally got placed at HSBC as a Trainee Software Engineer (TSE) – essentially an SDE role. This was a long process, and I'm really happy that it finally worked out.

Sharing my complete experience in case it helps someone preparing for HSBC.

Role: Trainee Software Engineer (TSE)
Type: Full-Time
Eligibility: 8+ CGPA, CSE/ECE
Selection Process: 2 Assessments → Technical Interview → HR Interview

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Round 1: Simulation Assessment

The first round was a simulation assessment consisting of around 8 sections.

It included:

• Behavioral questions
• Video-based questions
• Aptitude
• Verbal ability
• Situational questions
• A mix of the above

The assessment itself was untimed, but we were given around 1 hour 15 minutes as a guideline.

Since this was a Pan-India drive, this round was eliminatory.

Around 96 candidates appeared for this round.

Fortunately, I cleared it.

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Round 2: Codility Assessment

The second assessment was around 1 hour 35 minutes and had 3 questions.

Question 1 - DSA

A standard DSA problem. An AI assistant was provided to help understand the problem statement.

Question 2 - Debugging

The code was already provided, and we had to:

• Understand the existing implementation
• Identify the issue
• Debug it
• Correct the code

Question 3 - Interesting one

This was quite different.

We were given access to Claude Code, including models such as Haiku and Sonnet.

The problem statement was intentionally quite vague and was presented more like a GitHub repository/task.

We had to understand the existing codebase and implement the required functionality.

For me, this round was largely about:

• Understanding an unfamiliar codebase
• Prompting the AI effectively
• Debugging
• Implementing the required functionality
• Using AI as a coding assistant rather than blindly depending on it

Around 42 candidates appeared for this round.

I cleared this round and was shortlisted for the interviews.

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Round 3: Technical Interview

There were around 6 interviewers/panel members conducting approximately 26 interviews.

The interview was scheduled for around 1 hour, although mine lasted approximately 35–40 minutes.

Introduction

The interviewer started with his introduction and then asked me to introduce myself.

After that, he asked about my internship.

My internship involved Generative AI / RAG, so we went deeper into that.

RAG Discussion

He asked me to explain the complete RAG pipeline.

We discussed things around:

• Document ingestion
• Chunking
• Embeddings
• Vector database
• Retrieval
• Context injection
• LLM generation

Then he asked:

"What problem does RAG solve?"

The main points he was looking for were around:

• Reducing hallucination
• Providing the LLM with relevant external/contextual information
• Reducing unnecessary token usage compared to putting large amounts of information directly into the prompt

I wasn't able to phrase everything perfectly, but I managed to cover the important idea and the discussion went well.

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DSA Questions

Then came 3 very simple DSA questions.

1. Maximum two-digit number from consecutive digits

Given a string of digits, find the maximum two-digit number formed by consecutive digits.

Example:

05523

Possible two-digit numbers:

05, 55, 52, 23

Answer:

55

Very straightforward.

2. Second Maximum Element

Given an array, find the second largest element.

Pretty standard interview question.

3. LeetCode 1323 - Maximum 69 Number

Given a number consisting only of 6 and 9, change at most one digit to maximize the number.

This was exactly LeetCode 1323 - Maximum 69 Number.

All three questions were coded live using the JDoodle compiler provided by HSBC.

There were also a few follow‑up questions around the solutions, complexity, and edge cases.

I was able to answer the follow‑ups as well.

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Round 4: HR Interview

The HR round lasted around 30 minutes.

The interviewer was very cooperative and the discussion was quite comfortable.

I was asked around 8–10 questions, mostly behavioral.

Some of the questions were:

Why do you want to join HSBC?

I explained my motivation around working in a global organization, the scale of technology at HSBC, opportunities to learn, and my interest in building software in a large‑scale environment.

Tell me about a situation where you demonstrated leadership.

I discussed one of my project/hackathon experiences and explained the situation, my responsibility, and how I handled the team/task.

What have you learned in 2026?

I talked about the technical skills I had developed during the year, especially around Generative AI, RAG, backend development, and practical project experience.

You have a lot of work. How would you manage it?

I explained how I would prioritize tasks based on urgency, impact, deadlines, and dependencies, and communicate early if there were conflicting priorities.

What would you do if you had to work during bad health because the work was critical?

I focused on responsibility toward critical work while also communicating the situation appropriately and ensuring that the work was handled without compromising health or the team's delivery.

There were also a few other behavioral questions.

At the end, I asked 1–2 questions about HSBC and the work culture, and the interview concluded.

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Final Result

Around 4 days later, the final result came.

Out of the candidates who reached the final stage, 5 candidates were selected.

And thankfully...

I was one of them.

After months of preparation, assessments, interviews, rejections, and uncertainty, finally getting the FTE offer from HSBC as a Trainee Software Engineer feels amazing.

A big hurdle has finally come to a pause.

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My Takeaways

For anyone preparing for HSBC:

1. Don't underestimate the first assessment. It isn't purely technical. Behavioral, aptitude, verbal and situational sections can matter because the initial round is eliminatory.
2. Know your resume. If you mention RAG, GenAI, backend, MERN, projects, internships, etc., be prepared for follow‑up questions.
3. Keep your DSA fundamentals strong. At least for my interview, the DSA questions were quite basic. You should be comfortable with arrays, strings, basic searching/sorting, hashing, two pointers, basic complexity analysis, and simple implementation questions.
4. Prepare behavioral questions seriously. The HR round had a significant focus on behavioral/situational questions.
5. Don't panic if you don't answer something perfectly. Communication and composure matter too.