Syfe || SDE 2 || Interview Experience || Jan 2026
Summary
I interviewed for an SDE 2 - Java Backend Developer role at Syfe in January 2026. The interview process consisted of three rounds, covering DSA, LLD, and HLD. I was ultimately rejected in the final HLD round.
Full Experience
Location - Gurgaon
Role - Java Backend Developer
Experience - 3 years 9 months
Round 1: DSA Round (taken by 3rd party - Interview Vector)
The round began with project discussion and then some follow up questions. Coding questions asked -
- https://leetcode.com/problems/water-bottles/description/
- https://leetcode.com/problems/capacity-to-ship-packages-within-d-days/description/
Verdict - Positive
Round 2 - DSA and LLD round
The round began with project discussion and then some follow up questions.
DSA question asked - https://leetcode.com/problems/length-of-longest-subarray-with-at-most-k-frequency/description/
LLD question - Design a music player with the given features -
- Enable/ disable shuffle feature
- No song should be repeated while shuffling
- Get history of songs played
- Play/ pause songs
- Go to next/ previous song
You are required to specify functional and non-funtional requirements, list the tables and entities to be used, tell the major APIs, explain your logic to achieve all functional and non-functional requirements, explain the optimal data structures to be used in code, mention the design patterns, and discuss how to handle concurrent requests.
Verdict - Positive
Round 3 - HLD Round -
The round began with introduction and project discussion. The interviewer straight away jumped to the question. It was not a standard HLD question, but a situation based problem where I had to debug an issue.
- He shared a basic high level diagram of a micro-service. Suppose there are several users involved in multiple transactions and the system is working succesfully. All services are up, all databases are working fine, but one particular transaction does not yield any result for a particular user. How will you debug the case suppose you are on-call?
- I discussed various possible factors that could be the root cause and precautions/ solutions for them, but the interviewer came up with the same reply to each of my point - 'Now assume this is also working fine, what else can be the issue', may be he was expecting something more.
- I then discussed about the usage of logging and health monitoring tools to debug the performance of the system and check the status codes of various APIs. But it seemed this was also not sufficient.
Verdict - Negative
Overall - Rejected in the last round as each round was eliminatory.
Interview Questions (5)
Water Bottles
Given numBottles full water bottles, you can exchange numExchange empty bottles for one full water bottle. How many maximum water bottles can you drink?
Capacity To Ship Packages Within D Days
Given a weights array and D days, find the least weight capacity of the ship that will result in all packages being shipped within D days, assuming packages are loaded in order and cannot be split.
Length of Longest Subarray With At Most K Frequency
Given an integer array nums and an integer k, return the length of the longest subarray in nums such that the frequency of each element in this subarray is less than or equal to k.
Design a Music Player
Design a music player with the given features:
- Enable/ disable shuffle feature
- No song should be repeated while shuffling
- Get history of songs played
- Play/ pause songs
- Go to next/ previous song
You are required to specify functional and non-funtional requirements, list the tables and entities to be used, tell the major APIs, explain your logic to achieve all functional and non-functional requirements, explain the optimal data structures to be used in code, mention the design patterns, and discuss how to handle concurrent requests.
Debugging Microservice Transaction Issue
He shared a basic high level diagram of a micro-service. Suppose there are several users involved in multiple transactions and the system is working succesfully. All services are up, all databases are working fine, but one particular transaction does not yield any result for a particular user. How will you debug the case suppose you are on-call?