Education
Degree: B.Tech from a Tier-3 college
Experience
Current Role: Software Engineer
Experience: 2.5 years in a Consulting Services company
Company: PayPal
Location: Chennai

Interview Process for Software Engineer 2
Round 1: Online Assessment (90 mins on HackerRank)
Format: 3 questions
Closest Numbers Problem (Easy to Medium - LeetCode style)
Arrange Words Problem (Medium to Hard)
Minimum Total Weight Problem (Easy)

Round 2: Problem-Solving (45 mins)
Topics Covered:
Discussion on projects from my resume
Follow-up questions related to APIs
Real-time API scenario-based question
Basic questions on Java keywords
Testing concepts
Spring Framework concepts: Dependency Injection, Entity, and basic Spring-related questions
Coding task: Reverse a String

Round 3: System Design (45 mins)
Design a Payment Service to Handle Sending Money
Functional and Non-Functional Requirements
High-Level Design (HLD)
APIs and Database schema
Flowchart of the overall system
Design an Elevator System for an 8-story Building with 10 Lifts
Used scheduling algorithms
Explained multithreaded concepts

Round 4: Role Specialization (45 mins)
Topics Covered:
Application of OOPs concepts in real-world scenarios
Design principles used in recent projects and their advantages
Differences between synchronized and non-synchronized code; thread safety explained with examples
Corrected a code snippet to make database connections thread-safe

Round 5: Bar Raiser (45 mins)
Scalability Questions:
How to scale an application effectively?
Scenario: For an Amazon inventory system, if a customer searches for a product (e.g., Samsung TV) and finds it sold out, what could be implemented to improve the user experience?
How to ensure that products are always available to customers?

Final Verdict
Selected for the position of Software Engineer 2 at PayPal (Grad 23)