PhonePe Interview Experience | Offer | Accepted | SDE(Android) | Bengaluru

Hi guys so recently I had the opportunity to interview with PhonePe as I was already on my notice period in Inmobi-Glance and I was having an offer from ShareChat which I also had shared earlier.

I got this interview through a referral from a PhonePe employee.

So the interview initially consisted of 4 Rounds only for SDE (Android) role. And those were:

• DSA Round
• Android Platform Round
• Machine Coding Round (Android)
• HM Round

Let's go thorugh each and every round one by one-

DSA Round - In this round I was asked 2 DSA questions. The time duration of this round was 1 hour only and I had to solve both the questions in that time limit only.

The first question was from Graphs topic and I must say that I am not very strong in Graphs and I was not expecting any Graphs question but it was my first question.

Question was similar to : https://leetcode.com/problems/loud-and-rich/description/

Literally I took a lot of time to firstly understand the problem then came to an unoptimised approach to which interviewer was not that happy.

Then after 30 minutes he presented me another question.

Question was: https://leetcode.com/problems/jump-game-ii/description/

I solved this problem optimially before the given time limit and the interviewer was happy with my solution.

I totally lost my hope for next round but luckily I got call from recruiter the next day for next round :)

Android Platform Round - This round mainly revolved around basic android topics like ViewModel and its working, Activities, Fragments, Jetpack Compose.

Interviewer mainly dig deeper on topics like Services and its usecases which I comfortably answered.

There was no question from his side which I was not able to answer correctly.

Got a call from recruiter that I had cleared this round as well. Scheduled my next round the same day.

Machine Coding Round - In this round I was given a problem to design a E-Commerce app and how will I be managing the data between different screens.

The data should also be synced with the backend servers.

SO I basically was given some 4-5 criterias or features to complete in 90 minutes with scalable and clean code.

I followed MVVM + Clean Architecture in Android for this round. Firstly I told my approach to the interviewer and discussed a bit on this part.

Then when we were on same ground I started coding and I did it really fast as I had to complete all the features in the given time limit.

I did exceptionally well in this round that interviewer even praised me at last.

Then I got a call that I am eligible for HM Round. It was then scheduled for the next day.

HM Round - In this round the Hiring Manager discussed about my experience at Inmobi-Glance and I told whatever I had done in my 1.5 years of FTE at Inmobi-Glance.

Then he passed me an open ended question to design a map app and I had to tell him my approach in such a way that it is optimal and can be transformed into a market ready app with that approach.

We discussed a lot and then he asked some really tough behavioural questions to me which I answered confidently.

I felt this round as the most difficult one.

Unexpected happened : I was celebrating my farewell at my office (Inmobi-Glance) and I was pretty confident to get the offer that dat on May 30. Then HR called me and told me that there is a good and a bad news for me. I was shocked to hear this.

He told me that the collective feedback is mostly positive and they can consider me for an offer but I had to go through a Bar-Raiser Round due to my average performance in DSA Round

I literally was weeping from inside and multiple thoughts were running in my mind like: "May be they have found someone else that's why to reject me taking another round" etc etc.

But still I somehow managed myself and I agreed to his request.

The fact was that I also did not have any laptop to prepare for this round as I had submitted my mac back to my organization (Inmobi-Glance).

I borrowed a laptop from my friend and logged in my leetcode account and started preparing from next day.

Bar-Raiser Round - In this round I was asked 2 questions. And this round I would say was the most easy round.

The first question was based on "Min-Heap" which I solved optimally.

The second question was based on some strings like some word and pattern problem. I solved this also optimally.

Then that evening I got a call from recruiter that I had successfully cleared this round as well.

They were ready to give me an offer. And after 2-3 days I had my compensation call with my HM.

There we discussed my compensation.

Compensation details: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6817292/phonepe-offer-software-development-engin-e294/