I interviewed for Phonepe for the position of Software Engineer. I was contacted by a hiring consultant via Instahyre.

The whole process took around 3 months to complete.
There are generally 4 rounds of technical discussion, but for me it was 5 rounds due to a bad round.

Round 1 - Machine Coding : (Bad)
The problem was to design a object oriented service for a vehicle rental. The round was for 2 hours, in which 15 minutes were alloted for doubt clearing, and rest for coding.
They required a in-memory kind of storage with clear modules. And also test cases for verifying the given example.
I was able to complete the implementation, but was not able to add any test case or clear modularise my code.

The result was mostly boderline positive and the process moved forward.

Round 2 - DSA : (Good)
The round started with a ambiguous statement and on asking question further boiled down to implement a MST (Minimum Spanning Tree). The interviewer only asked for approach and algorithm to solve this, no code was required.
The second question required stack data structure and was similar in lines of next greater element. The interviewer asked for approach, code and also tested the code for various inputs.
The third problem was based on graphs, and required me to model the problem in a graph. I was a bit lost in the modelling part, then the interviewer provided a hint, and I was able to complete it. Then a follow-up was asked on this, which required a DFS. I was only able to provide the approach for this and time & space complexities.

The result was positive for this round.

Round 3 - System Design : (Good)
The problem was to design a quora like question-answer forum. I started with the requirement gathering, and then went on the the HLD design.
After that we discussed the DB, tables required and SQL vs No-SQL.
Then the interviewer asked to do some capacity estimation, which was quite new to me and the interviewer readily helped in that.
After that, we discussed some features like search, feeds and how do we implement that.

The result was positive for this round.

Round 4 - Hiring Manager: (Neutral acc. to me)
The round started with introductions and then we went onto behavioural questions. The questions were standard like, Why leaving current company? Expectation? Why Phonpe?
Overall it was good, but I felt that he was not convinced why I was leaving my current company.

So, I assume the result to be neutral.

Then, the de-brief happened, and they asked for an extra machine coding round, due to bad performance in the 1st round.

Round 5 - Machine Coding : (Good)
For this round, the problem statement to was to design an object oriented service for a Movie booking like BookMyShow.
This time I was prepared and able to complete the coding, write test cases and clearly modularise my code into Entity, Service and Repository layer.

The result for this round was also positive.

I recieved the verbal offer after 2 days, and made mistake of telling a low expectation which resulted in low-balling badly (maybe also due to 1st round).

Thoughts:

1. Phonepe very much focuses on the code and expects us to write modular code with with good naming convention.
2. The interviews were really nice and helped if stuck somewhere or having difficulty in remebering something.
3. The process was really slow and could have been completed in a month.
4. People please don't tell any expectations, use only other offers to negotiate and always mention the TC (not base).

EDIT 1:
Current TC - 35 LPA
YOE - 2.75

Offer - 42 LPA