PayU Interview Experience | Software Engineer (SDE 2) | Selected
Summary
I interviewed with PayU for an SDE 2 Backend role, completed three rounds (coding, system design, and hiring manager) and was selected.
Full Experience
Hi LeetCoders, you can read my interview experience with PayU for the role of SDE 2 - Backend. There were 3 rounds in total.
Round 1 (Virtual):
- Q1. Detect cycle in a linked list.
A1. Solved using slow-fast pointers. - Q2. Two sum problem.
A2. Solved using hashmap. - Q3. Design a generic user schema in SQL.
A3. Designed a basic schema and had a little discussion over how to store profile picture (DB vs S3).
Difficulty: Super Easy
Round 2 (Virtual)
High level design of Instagarm
- Started with functional and non-functional requirements, then actors and their actions.
- Mentioned all entities needed and moved to schema design, but the interviewer interrupted the flow.
- Discussion started on data ingestion and data retrieval. How to build user feed? How to serve meantime incoming posts? How to handle celebrities' posts? Push vs pull models.
- Brief discussion happened on the ranking of posts in a user feed.
- At last, discussion shifted to scaling, rate-limiting, and efficient storage of media files.
Difficulty: Easy, because the intervewer kept hopping on different topics but never drilled down one single topic.
Round 3 (F2F)
It was Hiring Manager round. Initial discussion mostly revolved around my work experience. Tried gauging do I know what I do from a business perspective. Later, questions were asked on logging, monitoring, and alerting.
Questions to be mentioned:
- Does Kafka support idempotency?
- Does Kafka guarantee ordering of events?
- There's a GET API fetching users' data, consumed by millions of clients. API response varies client-to-client and clients can also demand alteration in their response. How would you cater?
Difficulty: Medium
Final Result: Selected
~Anonymous
Interview Questions (7)
Detect Cycle in a Linked List
Detect cycle in a linked list.
Two Sum Problem
Two sum problem.
Design Generic User Schema in SQL
Design a generic user schema in SQL.
High Level Design of Instagram
High level system design of Instagram, covering functional and non-functional requirements, actors, schema design, data ingestion, user feed generation, handling celebrity posts, push vs pull models, ranking, scaling, rate‑limiting, and media storage.
Kafka Idempotency Support
Does Kafka support idempotency?
Kafka Ordering Guarantee
Does Kafka guarantee ordering of events?
API Design for Personalized GET Endpoint
Design a GET API fetching users' data, consumed by millions of clients, where the response varies per client and clients may request alterations in their response. How would you cater to this?