Swiggy SDE-2 Interview Experience (Backend)

Status: Rejected
Experience Level: 2+ years (Backend — Java/Spring + Node)
Location: Bangalore (onsite rounds)

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Online Assessment (OA)

Solved all the questions.
Unfortunately, I don’t remember the exact problems, but overall difficulty was Medium–Hard and very DSA-focused.

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Round 1 — DSA + LLD (60 min)

1. DSA:

• Given a rotated sorted array, find the smallest element in O(log n).

2. LLD:

• Parking Lot System

  • Standard problem.
  • Discussed entities (Vehicle, Slot, Ticket, Payment)
  • Covered allocation strategy and class diagram.

Overall went fine.

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Round 2 — LLD + HLD (60 min)

Problem: Train Ticket Booking System

• Explained all entities clearly (Train, Coach, Seat, Booking, User, Search Service).
• Covered seat allocation, concurrency control, waitlist logic, and basic high-level design.

I thought it went well, but still got rejected after this round.

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My Takeaway

I've been giving interviews continuously for the past couple of months, and one thing is clear:

👉 Startup expectations have gone very high.
Even if you do well but struggle briefly in a part of the problem, they will likely reject you.
They expect you to basically mug up all LLD/HLD patterns and solve instantly.

Not the most fair process, but that’s the current market.