PayPal SDE2 Interview Experience

YOE: 4, College: Tier II (NIT) Experience: Fintech startup

Round 1: DSA – Coding This was a pure problem-solving round with 2 leetcode medium-level DSA questions. One was based on dynamic programming and the other involved graphs. The interviewer expected a working solution along with edge case handling and complexity analysis. Round 2: System Design (self rating: 4/5) The second round was a deep dive into designing a ticket booking system like IRCTC. The interviewer wanted to know how to manage bookings, prevent double booking of seats, and optimize search queries for availability. Topics like concurrency, caching, and indexing were discussed thorougly. The interviewer was satisfied with the architecture and followup answers. Round 3: Experience (self rating: 4.5/5) This was a mix of technical and practical knowledge. It started with a discussion around my current projects, including architectural decisions, tooling, and challenges involved in my backend experience. Then I was asked to solve 2–3 easy LeetCode-style problems, followed by a short design conversation focused on optimizing API performance and implementing pagination for large datasets. Round 4: Bar Raiser (self rating: 4/5) The final round was a behavioral interview centered around leadership principles. The interviewer asked questions about ownership, cross-teams collaboration, handling failure, and resolving architectural conflicts in team.