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Summary
I interviewed for a Senior Software Engineer (Backend) role at Paytm Money. The process included an Online Assessment, a DSA round, and a System Design/Hiring Manager round. Despite performing well in the initial rounds, I did not receive an offer after the final round.
Full Experience
I recently interviewed for the Senior Software Engineer (Backend) position at Paytm Money. The entire recruitment process spanned approximately two weeks, from the initial Online Assessment to the final interview round.
Round 1: Online Assessment (OA)
This round lasted 63 minutes and consisted of two coding questions, which I found to be of medium-easy difficulty, along with six Multiple Choice Questions focusing on DSA theory, particularly around tree data structures. I successfully passed this round.
Round 2: DSA Interview
This hour-long interview focused on Data Structures and Algorithms. The interviewer posed two specific coding challenges:
1. Unique Paths (Dynamic Programming)
2. Search in Rotated Sorted Array (Binary Search)
Beyond the coding problems, we also delved into several backend-related topics, including Spring Boot basics and annotations, the lifecycle and working principles of the Garbage Collector, and features and lifecycle of the Stream API. I cleared this round as well.
Round 3: HM / System Design Interview
This was the final round, lasting one hour. It primarily involved an in-depth discussion about my past projects, where we covered their impact, trade-offs made, architectural decisions, testing strategies, and potential future improvements. I was also questioned on HTTP Status Codes, specifically understanding 4xx (client errors) and 3xx (redirection) categories. The interviewer then presented a coding challenge: 'Find the Kth Node from the End in a Linked List'. Following this, there was a threading question: 'Using two threads, print numbers from two arrays (odd and even) in sequence, for example: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10'.
Unfortunately, despite my efforts, I did not receive an offer letter after this final round.
Interview Questions (4)
A robot is located at the top-left corner of an m x n grid (marked 'Start' in the diagram). The robot can only move either down or right at any point in time. The robot is trying to reach the bottom-right corner of the grid (marked 'Finish' in the diagram). How many possible unique paths are there?
Given a sorted array that has been rotated at some pivot point, find a target value in it. The array has no duplicate elements. Your algorithm's runtime complexity must be in the order of O(log n).
Given the head of a singly linked list, return the kth node from the end of the list. You are guaranteed that k is less than or equal to the number of nodes in the list.
Implement a program that uses two separate threads to print numbers in sequence. One thread should print odd numbers and the other should print even numbers, ensuring the final output is a sorted sequence like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.