Currrent Job and Details

• SDE 2 - FAANG
• 3.8 - YOE
• Tier 1.5 College

Applied to PhonePe via a referal from a friend two weeks later received a interview for the Machine Coding Round

R1 - Machine Coding Round

• Design a Issue Management System was previously posted on the leetcode interview question discussions
• It had around 5 core requirements and 3 good to have requirements
• I was able to make a working code in 2 hour and submit within the deadline

Took around 1-1.5 weeks for scheduling the Machine Coding Round Review

• The reviewer asked a few questions around LLD design choices
• But it went good and the interviewer was convinced

R2- Problem Solving and DS Round

• Two DSA Questions were asked and needed to solved under 1 hour
• Q1 - Find the longest pallindrome substring in the string - DP
  • Was able to solve after few tries and generated a fully working code
• Q2 - Don't remember the exact question, but it was around Graphs and could be solved using DFS/BFS
  • Due to lack of time just gave an approach and the interviewer was convinced

R3- Sytem Design Round

• Was asked to design Shazam
• Was slighlty clueless but eventually pivoted around how can narrow down the song search space
• Gave 5-6 strategies around it and the interviewer was very impressed by these suggestions
• System Design was my forte and interviewer gave a strong hire

R4- Hiring Manager Round

• Two interviewers were present in this round and they started off with my project discussions
• It went on for 20 minutes and we discussed the scale, impact and Design Decissions
• After that my motivation for switch was discussed
• In end a System Design type question was asked gave a few approaches and gave a good answer which convinced the interviewers

2-3 days later Recruiter reached out and said we have a strong hire call from all the rounds

I'll be joining PhonePe and the compensation offered is pretty competitive, got a 20% hike on base pay and pretty fat joining bonus.

Resources used

• DSA - Leetcode, Striver Youtube Series
• System Design - Gaurav Sen Course, Exponent, ByteByteGo
• Machine Coding - Gaurav Sen Course