🚀 Hey folks!
After sharing my SDE-2 interview experience at Amazon (and receiving some really positive feedback 🙌), I thought I’d drop another one here — this time from a recent interview with Groww.
Hope you find it helpful — and as always, would love to hear your thoughts and feedback! Let’s dive in 👇
🎓 Background:
B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from one of the Top 10 IITs
10 months at a Big Service-based MNC
3 years in a Product-Based Company
Current Role: SDE-II in Product Based Company
🧠 Round 1: DSA
Duration: 1 Hour
Problem: Topological sort — Jobs represented as strings, Graph was disconnected and had cycles.
Goal: Print all jobs to be done before a given job.
✅ Solved in 45 mins
✅ Ran multiple test cases — all passed
🎯 Smooth ride.
💻 Round 2: Machine Coding
Duration: 2 Hours
Task: Build a scalable cache (end-to-end) only this statement was the problem & I was supposed to assume things by myself.
Implemented features:- add, contains, invalidate, validate, setMaxSize, fetchSize, printMap, Eviction logic via queue (FIFO). Hardcoded test data to verify functionality.
🔍 After 1.5 hrs, the interviewer joined. Code worked fine, but...
💬 Feedback:
“This isn’t scalable. FIFO isn’t enough — what if we want different eviction logic?”
✅ I explained how to make it scalable using interfaces
😕 Still didn’t seem impressed.
🏗️ Round 3: High-Level Design
Duration: 1 Hour
Task: Design a Stock Market System to handle:
Events: buy, sell, stop-loss
Incoming via queue, with 10ms SLA & we have to place the order within that time.
📌 Discussed:-
Sharding, Indexing, Partitioning, Caching
Happy flows, retries, failure handling, schedulers
👎 Feedback (a week later):
“Basic implementation — didn’t extend to multi-exchange/segment support. Needed more focus on scalability.” It seemed the Machine Coding round didn’t fully meet the interviewer’s expectations, which may have impacted the final decision during the debrief.
😅 Verdict:
Rejection #13 in the past year 🥲
Added proudly to my growing “Hall of Fame: Close but No Offer” wall 😂
Still learning. Still building. Still growing. 💪
If you’ve faced something similar — you’re not alone. Let’s keep pushing!
Link for my Amazon SDE-II Experience :-
https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6654251/amazon-l5-sde-ii-april25-hyderabad-by-a2-umh1/comments/2959468/