📌 Interview Experience – Kotak Mahindra Bank - Data Science / SDE1 (1 YOE)

I recently went through the interview process for a Data Science – SDE1 role. Sharing my experience in case it helps others.

🧠 Round 1 (L1 – Bar Raiser round)

Focused heavily on core concepts:

• Difference between method vs function
• Difference between range vs xrange
• Stratified sampling
• Train vs validation vs test sets
• Regularization
• Gradient descent
• Role of optimizers and types
• Bias-variance tradeoff
• Tensor vs NumPy array in deep learning
• Debugging shape mismatch issues
• Monitoring training (early problem detection)
• Training mode vs evaluation mode

LLM & GenAI topics:

• Tokenization and its impact
• Temperature in LLMs
• Common LLM failures
• RAG vs fine-tuning
• Hallucination mitigation
• Context window
• Embeddings & grounding
• Model inversion & data poisoning
• Handling stale/new docs in vector DB
• Prompt injection & adversarial inputs
• Sensitive data leakage (outputs/logs)
• Securing RAG pipelines

💻 Round 2 (L2 – Practical / Hands-on)

Scheduled ~1 month after L1.

• Given multiple datasets in Google Colab

• Tasks involved:

  • Data manipulation (groupby, aggregations, etc.)
  • Business interpretation questions

Also included interpretation-based reasoning like:

• Impact of discounting on profitability

📄 Round 3 (L3 – Resume Deep Dive)

~1 week after L2

• Entirely based on past projects and work experience

🧾 HR Round

~10 days later

• Notice period
• Compensation discussion
• General HR questions

✅ Verdict: Selected (Waiting for Offer Letter)

❓ Questions for the community:

1. How long does it usually take to receive the offer letter after the HR round?

2. How is the company in terms of:

   • Work-life balance
   • Compensation
   • Benefits