Nykaa || SDE 2 || Interview Experience || March 2026
Summary
I secured the SDE 2 position at Nykaa after four interview rounds, receiving strong positive feedback in each technical round and ultimately an offer with a 75 % salary hike.
Full Experience
Role - Java Backend Developer Experience - 3 years 10 months Location - Gurugram
Round 1 - DSA Round Project discussion and follow up questions. 2 DSA questions were asked
- https://leetcode.com/problems/populating-next-right-pointers-in-each-node/
- https://leetcode.com/problems/intersection-of-two-linked-lists/ Verdict - Strong Positive
Round 2 - LLD Round LLD of Delivery System of any app like Zepto/ Blinkit/ Nykaa (only from the perspective of the driver, not user).
- List down the functional and non-functional requirements.
- Use chat gpt to write the basic running code. Now write running code for the requirements you listed.
- Add some extra features like estimated time calculation, real time tracking details etc. Verdict - Strong Positive
Round 3 - LLD Round LLD of McDonalds having multiple outlets.
- List down the microservices, entities, database schema, program flow and basic APIs.
- Tell how will have you handle concurrent orders by multiple users to preserve the consistency of the stock of ingredients at a particular store.
- Various follow-up questions were asked, like writing database queries to fetch details of orders/ stock/ payments etc. or how to auto-scale your design. Verdict - Strong Positive
Round 4 - Managerial Round
- Project discussion and follow up questions
- Discuss some challenges which you faced during current projects and how did you solve them. How will you further improve the design of your current project
- What is singleton class, write sample code for it along with the driver class.
- How to make a singleton class thread-safe?
- What is static keyword? Verdict - Positive (but with few negative points, as I made few mistakes in writing the code for singleton class)
Overall - Selected. Offer - 75 % hike over current base salary.
Interview Questions (2)
Populating Next Right Pointers in Each Node
Given a binary tree where each node has an additional next pointer, connect each node's next pointer to its next right node on the same level. If there is no node to the right, set the next pointer to null. The solution must use only constant extra space (excluding recursion stack).
Intersection of Two Linked Lists
Given the heads of two singly linked lists, determine the node at which the two lists intersect. Return the intersecting node or null if there is no intersection. The solution should run in O(n) time and O(1) additional space.