Education: B.Tech from Tier-1 College
Years of Experience: 1
Prior Experience: At a huge MNC with no work and learnings, so left without job in hand
Compensation Offered: 31 LPA (25 fixed + 6 one year bonus)

📞 Recruiter Call
Recruiter asked me for a suitable time for the first round. They told me about the format of the interview which would consist of 3 rounds -

1. Problem Solving
2. System Design
3. Culture Fit

Round 1: Problem Solving

This interviewer was very chill and friendly and asked me about the regular dance -- introductions, why you want to leave your current company (told them I was still working at my previous company) etc. He was an SDE-III with 5 years of experience and has been in Blinkit since.

He made it clear that he doesn't intend to ask very tough DSA questions and only wants to check if I can think under pressure. He ended up asking - House Robber and House Robber II

I was easily able to answer these two questions and the discussion started over SQL v/s NoSQL and Redis. Eg. - what happens if we use only Redis and no database.

I was able to answer the questions and had a nice informal chat with the interviewer because he was from where my previous company was located.

Round 2: System Design

The interviewer was another SDE-III with 7 years of experience. Again, I really liked the interviewer because he was super chill and supporting. He asked me to relax many times in the interview when it seemed like I was rushing or struggling. It was supposed to be a system design round but we started off with a DSA question. Here's a rough idea about the question -

Given two arrays with unique numbers, arr1 and arr2, find whether there exists an array, 
arr3 which has arr1 and arr2 both as its subsequence and arr3 has all unique numbers. 
Return true or false.
Example:

Sample 1:
arr1 = [2, 3, 5, 1]
arr2 = [4, 3, 5, 1, 9]
Ans: true
arr3 could be [2, 4, 3, 5, 1, 9]

Sample 2:
arr1 = [2, 3, 5, 1]
arr2 = [2, 3, 1, 5]
Ans: false

I was able to solve this question and the discussion shifted to system design. He asked me to design a ticket booking system like BookMyShow. Since we were short on time, he wasn't expecting me to design the whole system but probed me on some design and architectural decisions. Some scenarios I was asked -

• How would you improve the UX for ticket booking in a high traffic popular event?
• If two customers select the same seat and at the same time, how does a system handle bookings such as this.
• Some discussion along pessimistic and optimistic locking and redis followed.

The interviewer was super cool and supportive and told me that he likes to take interviews in somewhat an informal way rather than a strict formal setting.

Round 3: Culture Fit
This round was more of a formality. The interviewer was the Tech Lead with 13 years of experience. He came a bit late and told me that he needed people with sharp problem solving skills and how I fared with my problem solving skills. He started giving me problems about the business directly and it was more of me speaking and trying to ask for clarification questions than a discussion. The problem quickly transitioned to another in between the first problem and the interview was closed just as abruptly after he asked me if I would be able to relocate and what team I would work in.
This round, I think did not matter in terms of the result because it was just a 30 minutes round and two actual business problems in this time period could only be solved half-assed-ly.

Result:
I was worried about the last round but got a phone call from the recruiter the next day and they mailed the offer letter to me. The whole process happened really quickly which I loved (recruiter call -> offer within 10 days). Overall, liked the hiring process and hoping would love to work there as well.

Cheers!