IDFC

Role: Application Engineer

College: Not Specified

Interview Date: August 2025

Interview Type: On-Campus, Full-Time

Result: Eliminated after Round 2

Difficulty: Not Specified (Coding questions were "very easy")

Rounds: 4 rounds (Online Assessment, Interview - Round 1, Interview - Round 2, and implied further rounds)

Topics Asked: Aptitude, MCQs, Coding, DBMS (Normalization, SQL queries, pagination), Java Springboot (advantages, gradle, maven), DSA (Abstraction, Overriding, Virtual/Pure Virtual functions, Upcasting/Downcasting, Error Handling, Compile-time/Runtime), Projects (system design, architecture, database schema).

Experience:

IDFC visited the campus for on-campus recruitments for the Application Engineer role in August 2025. The recruitment process included an online assessment and a total of 4 rounds, though the candidate was eliminated after the second round.

The Online Assessment was conducted virtually and consisted of Aptitude questions, MCQs, and two very easy coding questions.

Interview - Round 1 was a technical interview conducted in person, starting with introductions. Technical questions were categorized by subject:

• Coding: Check whether parentheses are balanced or not (without using a stack or HashMap); Sort a string without using any sorting algorithms or built-in sort functions.
• DBMS: What is normalization? What are the different types of normalization? Given a table, find its normal form. Given customer (c_id, c_name) and product (p_id, p_name) tables, use an orders table (with c_id and p_id as foreign keys) to retrieve product name and customer name for orders on the current date. Write a query to retrieve the first 100 tables on the first page, second hundred on the second page, and so on. Will that code cause an error if there are only 10 rows?
• Java Springboot: Why use Java Springboot? Questions about Gradle and Maven. Advantages of Java Springboot over Java.
• DSA: How to implement abstraction? Different situations for overriding. Virtual and pure virtual functions (with sqrt function example). Given a Java code demonstrating upcasting and downcasting, explain it and discuss if downcasting causes an error. Familiarity with built-in and user-defined errors, what happens when an error is encountered, and how to make the program finish execution (try-catch blocks). What do compile-time and runtime mean, and what does a compiler generate?

Interview - Round 2 was completely resume-based. Interviewers focused in-depth on the system design and architecture of the candidate's projects and asked to draw the database schema. The candidate did not advance to the next round after this stage.