PhonePe

Role: Software Engineer (SDE2)

College: BTech from Tier-1 College in India

Interview Date: May 2024

Interview Type: Not Specified (Applied through referral)

Result: Offer Accepted

Difficulty: Not Specified

Rounds: 4 rounds

Topics Asked: Machine Coding (Low-Level Design, Strategy Pattern), Data Structures, Algorithms, System Design (High-Level Design, APIs, Architecture, Database Design, Leaderboard), Behavioral Questions, Project Discussions

Experience:

This candidate, with 7.5 years of experience including 2.5 years as an SDE2 at Amazon, received and accepted an offer for a Software Engineer (SDE2) role at PhonePe in May 2024. The interview process involved four rounds after applying through a referral.

Round 1 was a Machine Coding round. The problem statement was to "Design a PhonePe Resolution Service." This involved a scenario where tickets/issues are assigned to agents, or added to an agent's backlog, considering ticket-type and agent specialities. The candidate had 2.5 hours to code the solution in their personal IDE and email it. It was emphasized to use the Strategy Pattern for pluggable assignment logic and in-memory data structures. Time management was a crucial aspect. An evaluation round occurred a couple of days later, involving a 30-minute discussion where the candidate explained the code, design, and implementation choices.

Round 2 was a Problem Solving/Data Structures round. Two questions were asked: "1. Find an element in a rotated sorted array." and "2. Given a binary tree, where each node is storing a value, find the maximum path sum of any non-empty path" (similar to LeetCode's "Binary Tree Maximum Path Sum").

Round 3 was a System Design round. The task was to "Design a Tagging Service," similar to an Atlassian interview design question. This required coming up with APIs, overall architecture, database design choices, and a leaderboard update mechanism for trending tags (hourly/weekly dashboard).

Round 4 was the Hiring Manager round. This round involved a general discussion about the candidate's past work, areas of interest, and critical contributions. The manager also explained the work at PhonePe, team structure, and critical ongoing projects, as well as the in-house backend services and technologies used. The recruiter informed the candidate of their inclination to make an offer a couple of days later, followed by a compensation discussion and confirmation of the joining date a week after that.