PharmEasy | SDE1 | Bangalore | July 2021 [Reject]

I had an interview for an SDE1 position at PharmEasy in July 2021 in Bangalore. I currently work as an SDE1 in a SaaS-based start-up and have 2 years of experience.

1st Technical round (1 hour):
This round consisted of three problems:

• Designing an LRU-based caching system with a capacity 'n'.
• Finding the missing number in an unsorted array of size 'n' with elements less than or equal to 'n'. For example, in [2,4,3,5], 1 is missing.
• Finding the next number in a series, given an unsorted array of size 'n' containing consecutive numbers. For example, for [4,3,6,5], the output should be 7.

I managed to solve all the questions, and the two panel members seemed impressed with my performance in this round.

2nd Technical round (1.5 hours):
The second round focused on system design.

• I was asked to design a Low-Level Design (LLD) for a file sharing system.

This round was a very negative experience for me. There was only one panel member, and he barely communicated. After the initial discussion about the requirements, he muted himself and only spoke again when I was almost finished with my design. I proposed implementing features like caching and long polling, but he explicitly told me that they weren't required for the scope of this problem.

About an hour after the interview, I received a call from HR informing me of my rejection. When I asked for feedback, I was told that caching and long polling were missing from my design—features that the interviewer had told me were not needed! It was quite frustrating, as I even had to call HR during the interview because the panel member had muted himself and wasn't responding.