Kotak | SDE 2 | Backend Engineer | India | Aug 2026 | Reject
Anonymous User
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BackendInterviewKotak Mahindra BankSDE 2

🚀 Kotak SDE II Backend Interview Experience

💼 Experience: 3 years 3 months

👨‍💻 Current Role: Software Engineer at a FAANG company in India

🎓 Education: B.Tech, CS, Tier 1, India

💰 Current Compensation: ₹33 LPA

I recently interviewed for an SDE II Backend Engineering role at Kotak, India.

📝 Application

Recruiter called me on phone directly for this job opening. I think he got my number from InstaHyre or LinkedIn. I don't remember exactly how, but I never applied to Kotak on Career Portal.

📞 Round 1 — DSA + LLD + HLD

⏱️ Duration: 90 minutes

This was an elimination round. It was taken by a 3rd party company called Bar Raiser.

DSA (30 mins):

LLD (45 mins):

  • LLD of Food Delivery App (Eg; Zomato)
    • Expectations: Discuss requirements, find entities, draw class diagram and explain design pattern.
    • Machine coding was not expected.
    • There were multiple questions on which design pattern fits where, explain whole of SOLID, explain OOPS, etc.

HLD (15 mins):

  • 5 questions directly of HLD.
  • No full-flegded HLD.
    • How does a distributed system behave during a network partition? What factors do you consider, and what are the key trade-offs?
    • What is a lock? What different types of locks are there? When would you use a lock, and when would you avoid it?
    • When would you favor consistency over availability, and when would you favor availability over consistency?
    • What is the difference between strong consistency and eventual consistency? What are the trade-offs?
    • What is idempotency? How do you define an idempotency key, and how would you use it for a transaction such as placing an order in a food-delivery application?

✅ Result: Hire

After this round, I was moved to the 2nd stage round

💻 Round 2 — Behavioral + DSA

⏱️ Duration: 60 minutes

This was an elimination round, taken by SDE 2 with 4+ YOE.

Behavioral - 10 mins

  • Introduce yourself
  • Describe an ambiguous situation you faced - Eg; Tell me about a time when you delivered a project with ambigous problem statment. How did you approach it?

DSA - 45 mins

✅ Result: Hire

In this round, I felt that if you have previously solved these problems, only then you can pass this. Because otherwise doing 1 Medium and 1 Hard with the most optimal 1D solution and monotonic stack is impossible to do within 45 minutes.

After this round, I was moved to the final interview round.

💻 Round 3 — HLD + LLD

⏱️ Duration: 60 minutes

This was an elimination round and the final round with the Hiring Manager. The recruiter had mentioned that this would be a pure LLD round.

The question was: “Design a vehicle booking and loan processing application” — essentially, an application used by the sales team at a Hyundai showroom to book a car and initiate the loan process.

I started with requirements gathering and defining the entities. After ~10 minutes, the interviewer asked me to switch to an HLD and complete a high-level diagram in 5 minutes.

We then discussed potential failures, bottlenecks, and scalability. The expectation seemed to be to include components such as MQs, caches, load balancers, etc., even where their necessity wasn't immediately obvious given the limited time.

After that, we returned to the LLD. I finalized the entities and created the class diagram. We also discussed design patterns such as Strategy, Singleton, Factory, and Decorator, including where they could potentially fit into the design.

I felt that I answered the questions satisfactorily. However, my overall impression was that the interviewer was looking for explicit coverage of various HLD components and design patterns, even when they were not strictly required by the initial requirements. I was disappointed with how the interview was conducted. Having previously interviewed with a couple of FAANG companies, I have a reasonable understanding of what to expect from a structured technical interview. Compared to those experiences, I found the structure and direction of this interview to be a significant letdown.

The round concluded there, and given my experience, I wasn't expecting much from the outcome.

❌ Result: No Hire

📌 Final Outcome

❌ Rejected

PS

  • Notice Period of Kotak: 3 Months (Non-Negotiable)
  • SDE 2 Pay of Kotak: Ranges from 30L to 60L; they decide it based on your past CTC
  • No. of interviews depends on your previous company. If you are from FAANG, expect 3. If from Service based, expect 5.

I am currently also in interview loops with 2 other companies, apart from the ones already mentioned below. I'll share the interview experiences for those companies as well once I have the final outcomes. 🚀

Kotak Mahindra Bank
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