Kotak Interview experience for SDE-I
Summary
I went through three interview rounds at Kotak for an SDE‑I position, covering DSA, LLD, HLD, and system design, and was asked to solve problems like Climbing Stairs, Merge Two Sorted Arrays, implement a load balancer, and design a meeting scheduler.
Full Experience
Round-1: Bar‑raiser
Was taken by an external vendor & was 1.5 hours long. Was asked everything, DSA+LLD+HLD.
DSA:
Climbing Stairs
Merge Two Sorted Arrays in Place.
LLD:
Library Management, Requirements were given in hand. Had to define Entities, Relationships between them, APIs, DB Schema, Design Pattern usage. (No coding was expected - surprised)
HLD:
Were few questions like splay tree, indexing etc.
Round-2: CV & DSA round:
Was grilled on my CV, why's and how's for each thing i had written in my CV. Follow ups for decisions etc.
For DSA, it was a simple question: Implement a load balancer. Was given quite a few follow ups as well like how would make it thread safe, memory efficient etc.
Round-3: LLD
Was asked to design meeting scheduler. Needed to define functional non functional requirements. Entities, Relationships between them etc DB Schema for them as well. Once this was done, we moved to coding. Was asked to code only the core method to schedule a meeting and schedule meeting in recurring fashion like each friday and stuff. Was asked to prevent double booking as well. We talked about DB Locking, what all fields would be involved for it etc.
Interview Questions (4)
Climbing Stairs
You are climbing a staircase. It takes n steps to reach the top. Each time you can climb either 1 or 2 steps. In how many distinct ways can you reach the top?
Merge Two Sorted Arrays In‑Place
Given two sorted integer arrays arr1 and arr2, merge them into a single sorted array without using extra space beyond O(1). The result should be reflected in the original arrays.
Implement a Load Balancer
Design and implement a simple load balancer that distributes incoming requests across a set of server instances. Consider thread‑safety and memory efficiency in your implementation.
Meeting Scheduler Design
Design a meeting scheduler system. Define functional and non‑functional requirements, entities, relationships, and a database schema. Implement the core method that schedules a meeting, supports recurring meetings (e.g., every Friday), and prevents double‑booking. Discuss locking mechanisms and necessary fields for concurrency control.