Piramal Finance | SDE 3 | Interview Experience

Piramal Finance Bangalore had total 4 Technical Rounds and 1 Behavioral Round.

1st Round (60 mins) (Online) (DSA): Discussion was with SDE3 Basic Introduction Discussion for 15 mins around Project One Graph related question (mostly related to BFS), don't remember the exact question, I was able to solve this

2nd Round (60 mins) (Online) (LLD) Discussion was with SDE3 Basic Introduction Discussion for 15 mins around Project

Design a Feature Flag System
Problem Statement
Design a feature flag (feature toggle) system that allows applications to dynamically enable or disable features without redeploying code.
The system should allow controlled rollout of features to users.
Functional Requirements
1. 	Create and manage feature flags.
2. 	Enable/disable a feature globally.
3. 	Enable feature for:
       -> specific users
       -> percentage rollout (e.g., 20% users).
4. 	Evaluate whether a feature is enabled for a given user.
5. 	Support multiple applications/services using the same system.
6. 	Changes should reflect dynamically (no application restart).
Example usage
isEnabled("NEW_CHECKOUT", userContext)
→ true / false

I was able to solve it and think about edge cases, interviewer was satisfied with the solution.

3rd Round (60 mins) (Online) (HLD): Discussion was with Architect Basic Introduction Few Behavioral questions

Stock Alert System 

Functional Requirements:
Select any stock, set alert for any and or upper threshold and lower threshold 
If stock reaches that value notify the user 
Notification type: SMS, Whatsapp

Non Functional Requ:
This alert should be instantaneous (latency is acceptable as real time as possible)
This alerts high priority (no loss) -> delivery exactly once 

Assumptions:
Web Portal/app user will come and set the alerts 
Backend system should notify the user
Some external system feed you will get 

Scale:
No of stocks : 10000
No of users: 10M users 
50% of users will have 5 alerts 
5 million users will each 5 alerts daily basis 
At max 25 millions notifications sent during market hours -> 6 hrs window -> send 12k Notifications per second 
Addition of alerts: 1k rps for addition of alerts

Overall I felt he was not very much involved, and it was more of one way discussion.

The feedback first two rounds was very positive, and for third round Architect was not satisifed with Scalability part hence he wanted repeat of HLD round with another SDE3.

4th Round (60 mins) (In Person) (HLD): Discussion was with SDE3, though round was scheduled for 1 hr, it steched to more than 1.5 hrs, also this round happened after Behavioural round. Started out with Basic Introduction and then below system design problem

Design Notification System 

Scale:
Send 1 Billion notification per day

SLA should be less than 5s

this were the vague requirements shared, I had to talk through each use case and created flow diagram and had discussion, I felt discussion was good and more of two way communication.

5th Round (60 mins) (In Person) (Behavioral): Discussion was with Engineering Manager Basic Introduction

He asked many behavioral questions, before giving this interview read about Piramal's leadership principles and create one example from your experience. He tried to to grill me a lot on each situation by asking questions like why this is challenging, why did you take this decision etc.

Got feedback: They had de-brief, both HLD round's feedback is Scalability part is missing but HR was not very well versed with Tech so he was repeating the same sentence, but where exactly scalability was missing I didn't get, although I enjoyed the 2nd HLD conversation but didn't get any concrete feedback. I was very hopeful that I can crack this but I guess still a long way to go before I land any offer.