Previous Experience

Status: ~6 Years Experience
Position: Software Engineer at PhonePe
Location: Bangalore, Karnataka
Date: November 2021

Context:
I received a referral from one of the senior managers I had worked with in my previous company. I received call for screening rounds in a week.

Screening Round (1 hour)
Interview asked following things in order for next 30 mins:

• About my technical background
• Followed up on my teams-owned system and their setup in details

Later 30 mins, we spend dicussing variation of this DP question: https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-cost-to-cut-a-stick/

After getting GREEN signal in my screening round. HR called me and setup 4 techincal rounds.

Techinal Round-1 (1 hour)
Interviewer asked little about myself and then she asked me following Problem Solving and Data Structure questions:

• Question 1: https://leetcode.com/problems/prime-palindrome/description/
• Question 2: https://leetcode.com/problems/container-with-most-water/

I was able to solve both the questions.

After that we still had ~15mins left, so she asked to design a personalization based system for the customers.

Techinal Round-2 (1 hour)
Interviewer straight-away asked me 2 PS and DS questions, I don't recall them correctly,

• first, was on string manipulation.
• second, was mathematical probability based question

I was able to solve both the questions.

Then we got 20mins left, therefore, he asked me to design "Parking Lot System", upon following up with me. we decided to build it only for one Shopping Mall at a time.

Techinal Round-3 : Hiring Manager (1 hour)
My interviewer was my hiring manager. Thus, he asked me about my past experiences and projects I did. Then to my surprise, he asked one toughest questions: "The variation of KMP algorithm". I would thanks to god that during that time I was preparing alot of PS and DS questions.

Therefore, I was able to propose the solution and was almost able to finish writing my code. Unfortunately, I was not able to dry run sample test-cases on the writen code due to time constraints.

Techinal Round-4 : Senior Hiring Manager (1 hour)
My interviewer was the same senior manager who referred me inside. Since we knew each other already. Therefore, we both were very comfortable with each other, and skipped the introducing part.

We directly jumped to the projects and the system i have worked during my tenure in PhonePe. Out of many systems, he picked one system (Graph System of PhonePe), and then we discussed in depth about that system. He asked lot of interesting questions regarding it. Since I knew it in and out. I was able to explain to him throughly. We ended the interview with good note.

Then, after the de-brief meeting of those rounds. I got a call from HR after a week. They would want to move forward with the last round.

Techinal Round-5 : Bar Raiser Round (1 hour)
My interviewer was Director equivalent person. We first talked about our work and ethics. After that, he asked one Low-Level Design question: "Design LRU cache". We spent intial 30mins on that.

After that, we moved to some behaviorual questions, some of them which I remember are:

• Tell me about the last incident when you had disagreement with someone and how you handled it?
• Tell me about an incident when you disagree with you senior and later you followed what he said and why you followed it?
• Tell me about an incident when you disagree with you senior and later your senior followed your advice and why?
• Some questions related to motivation?

Later the following week, I received a mail from HR asking me about my last 3-months payslip and few other documents. I sent those on time.

After 1-2 weeks, I recieved offer letter from Microsoft for "Senior Software Engineer" position.

I am also planning to a add small video to share my interview experience. Link will be shared soon. Till then stay tuned!