Flipkart | 2024 | oncampus | AMA
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FlipkartInterview

My Flipkart SDE-1 Interview Experience

I am a 2025 graduate from a Tier 1 college and landed a job offer as an SDE-1 at Flipkart recently through campus placements.
As a non-CS graduate, I understand the struggles many face when applying for SDE roles, and I want to give back to the community by assissting both through interview advice for flipkart and a much needed confidence boost.
Interview Process Overview
Round 1: Online Assessment

Format: 3 DSA questions
Topics Covered: Sorting, Arrays, and Dynamic Programming (DP)
	Difficulty: 1 Easy , 1 Med , 1 Hard.
Duration: 1 hour
Performance: Solved all three questions completely, except for one missed edge case in the DP problem.

Round 2: Problem-Solving & Data Structures (PSDS) Round 1

Interviewer: SDE 3 from Flipkart
Format: Solve 2 DSA questions in a Google Doc within 1 hour
Questions:
    Minimum Window Substring
    Daily Temperatures
Difficulty: Easy-Medium
Experience:
    Solved both questions satisfactorily.
    The interviewer focused on optimizations, especially reducing function calls in Question 1.

Round 3: Problem-Solving & Data Structures (PSDS) Round 2

Format: Solve 3 DSA questions within 1 hour
Difficulty: Ranged from Easy to Hard
Questions:
    Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters
        Asked to reduce time complexity from O(2N) to O(N) by minimizing pointer movement.
        Required a few hints but solved it successfully.
    Coin Change (Dynamic Programming):
        Explained the bottom-up DP approach directly to save time.
    A logical LLD question:
        Discussed the approach to solving the problem since we ran out of time before coding.

Round 4: Hiring Manager Round

Discussion Points:
    My background (schooling, internship, interests).
    Asked the hiring manager about his career trajectory and Flipkart's work culture.
Key Takeaway: Approached this calmly, as I didn’t want excitement to affect my performance.

Tips for Flipkart SDE-1 Interviews

Focus Areas:
    DP on strings and arrays, sliding window algorithms.
    These were the most commonly asked topics across the assessment and interviews.
Optimize Your Approach:
    Have a basic optimized solution ready in your mind.
    If short on time, explain your high-level ideas clearly before diving into code.
Practice Talking While Coding:
    Practice this on LeetCode  while practicing itself to articulate your thought process better during interviews.
Learn Basic HLD Concepts:
    This will help you ask better questions about scalability and design during interviews, which is relevant to Flipkart's work since most of their work involves around scaling systems.

Advice for Those Struggling:

I know how it feels to keep grinding DSA day in and day out without visible results. It can get lonely, especially if your friends have already been placed. However, there is always light at the end of the tunnel.

Here’s what worked for me:

Let go of expectations and focus purely on your preparation.
Don’t let results affect you emotionally.

Keep pushing forward, and success will come your way.

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