WheelsEye Interview Experience | 5 Rounds | SDE-I

Hi everyone 👋, I recently interviewed at WheelsEye (product-based, logistics domain) for a Backend Engineer role and wanted to share my detailed experience here, hoping it helps someone!

There were 5 rounds in total:

3 Virtual (Online) Rounds

2 Face-to-Face (In-Office, Gurgaon)

1st Round: DSA Round (Virtual) Started with a quick introduction and a few questions about my previous tech stack.

Straight after that, moved to DSA coding questions:

Q1: Minimum Window Substring (Sliding Window)

Q2: Kth Maximum Element (Using Priority Queue)

My Experience: I thought I nailed this round, but later saw partial pass feedback. The reason:

I solved Kth max by sorting (brute force) and didn’t proactively optimize using Priority Queue. Lesson learned: In interviews, unless time-constrained, always aim for an optimal solution even if the interviewer doesn’t explicitly ask for it.

2nd Round: HLD (High-Level Design) (Virtual, same day) Taken by an SDE-2/3 (seemed very technically strong). Discussion Flow:

My past projects: Deep dive into tech choices like MySQL vs MongoDB, Kafka vs RabbitMQ, and why Kafka Streams with binlogs instead of batch processing.

Design Scenario: Third-party API has rate limits, but incoming traffic is huge.

How would I handle that? (→ Discussed building an internal rate limiter + using Kafka Dead Letter Queues (DLQ) for failures.)

Another Scenario: For dynamic tags storage at scale (10M to 1B companies):

Initially discussed MySQL/MongoDB, but eventually recommended Elasticsearch due to its inverted index (Learned it properly after the interview).

My Experience: The round lasted ~1.5 hours instead of 1 hour — a great sign! I was confident and within 5 minutes of the round, HR called to schedule the next round.

3rd Round: LLD (Low-Level Design) (Virtual) Problem: Design a Hotel Management System

Multiple hotels, multiple room types, concurrent room booking handling.

My Approach:

Detailed class diagrams.

Booking service to handle concurrency.

Locking strategies for concurrent booking cases.

My Experience: Interviewer was neutral (no expressions) — hard to judge. Still, I felt I explained it pretty well. Confirmed later from HR that the round went good.

4th Round: Cultural Round (Face-to-Face, Gurgaon) Taken by the Vice President.

Topics discussed:

Technical challenges I faced in my previous roles.

Scale I have worked on.

Practices and problem-solving approaches.

Discussed WheelsEye’s vision and current projects.

Asked about his career move from MMT and Tokopedia to WheelsEye.

My Experience: Very mature and insightful discussion around technology and business impact. Overall, it was positive.

5th Round: Techno-functional + Culture Fit (Face-to-Face, same day) Taken by the Product Head.

Discussions included:

Why I left Shiprocket.

What were the biggest business-impacting projects I worked on.

Problems I observed at my previous company that I would like to fix.

Understanding how I think about business + tech impact.

My Experience: Since I worked closely with the Finance team in Shiprocket, I was able to explain business impact clearly — this round also went very well.

Final Thoughts As of today, I have completed all rounds and am waiting for the final verdict (offer letter 🤞). I will update this post once I receive the offer and also write another post on the compensation offered.

Some Key Takeaways for You:

Even if the interviewer doesn’t ask for an optimized solution, always strive for the optimal one.

Clarify assumptions and show curiosity while discussing system design.

Stay calm even if the interviewer doesn’t react much.

Read about the company and its business beforehand — it really helps in culture rounds.

Understand business impact of your previous projects — it helps in techno-functional discussions.

Profile:

Experience: 2.3 Years

Previous Domains: Product-Based, Logistics, Finance

Hope this helps anyone preparing for backend roles at product companies 🚀.