I recently interviewed for an SDE-2 role at PhonePe. The process consisted of 4 rounds: Machine Coding/LLD, DSA, HLD, and Hiring Manager.

Round 1 — Machine Coding / LLD

The first round was a machine coding assignment. I was given a problem around designing a To-Do List application, where the expectation was to come up with a proper low-level design and provide a working implementation.

The assignment was provided through a link, and there was no camera or screen surveillance involved during the coding assignment. The instructions explicitly mentioned that AI tools should not be used for writing the code.

After submitting the assignment, a 45–60 minute discussion was scheduled to review the implementation.

The interviewer went through the code in detail and asked questions around:

• Why I chose a particular design/approach
• How different parts of the implementation were working
• Logic and edge cases
• Possible optimizations
• Trade-offs in the implementation
• Improving some functions that I had implemented using a brute-force approach

Overall, this was more of a code-review + LLD discussion rather than simply checking whether the submitted code worked.

The interviewer also gave me a couple of functions from my implementation and asked me to optimize them, which made the round fairly interactive.

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Round 2 — DSA

The second round was a DSA interview with 2 problems.

The questions were not presented as straightforward LeetCode-style problems. Both had a story/context around them, so understanding the actual problem requirements was an important part of the interview.

The problems were approximately:

• Graph-based problem — Medium
• Set-based problem — Medium

For both problems, I was able to explain:

• The brute-force approach
• The optimized approach
• Time and space complexity
• Why the optimized approach was better

The interviewer was primarily interested in my problem-solving approach and the implementation logic. I wasn’t required to completely run the code against multiple test cases during the interview.

Overall, I found the DSA round to be reasonable, but the initial problem interpretation required some discussion because the questions weren’t simply stated as standard LeetCode problems.

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Round 3 — HLD

The third round was a system design/HLD round.

The problem was to design something similar to Shazam, where a user can provide a sound/music sample and the system identifies the corresponding song.

This was a relatively new problem for me, and I hadn’t specifically prepared this question before.

The interesting part was that the problem required thinking about areas such as:

• Processing audio/sound input
• Converting audio into a suitable representation
• Handling binary/audio data
• Storage of audio-related data
• Matching a given audio sample against existing data
• Scalability
• High-level service architecture
• Storage and retrieval of large/binary objects

The interviewer was quite supportive throughout the discussion and allowed me to explore different approaches.

I was able to discuss the requirements first and then come up with different approaches for processing the audio and identifying the song. We also discussed how the system could handle the data flow and storage.

Because of the time constraint, we couldn’t go into every component in extreme detail, but I was able to provide the overall high-level architecture and explain the reasoning behind it.

Overall, this was one of the more interesting rounds for me because it wasn’t a very standard HLD problem. I felt the discussion went well, and the interviewer seemed satisfied with my approach and the way I was breaking down an unfamiliar problem.

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Round 4 — Hiring Manager

After the HLD round, there was a wait of roughly a week before the next round was scheduled.

The Hiring Manager round had some scheduling issues initially. On the first scheduled date, the interviewer didn’t join, so the round had to be rescheduled.

A few days later, the interview was again postponed. Eventually, I had to follow up with HR regarding the scheduling.

During this period, HR also asked whether I would be interested in some other location instead of Bangalore. I mentioned that Bangalore was my preferred location, and eventually the Hiring Manager round was scheduled again for the Bangalore position.

The actual Hiring Manager interview went on for approximately 1 hour 15 minutes.

The discussion was primarily around my professional experience and projects. Some of the areas discussed were:

• Projects I had worked on
• Deep dive into one of my projects
• Difficult technical problems I had handled
• On-call scenarios
• How my systems worked in production
• CI/CD pipeline
• How my team operated
• My role and responsibilities within the team
• General engineering and ownership-related questions

From my perspective, this was a very good discussion. I was able to answer the questions confidently, and the conversation was quite detailed.

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Final Outcome

After the Hiring Manager round, I was expecting the process to move towards an offer.

However, I didn’t receive an update for couple of days. I tried following up with HR but didn’t initially get a response.

Eventually, I received a rejection email.

I also tried reaching out to HR afterward to understand what went wrong and whether there was any specific feedback regarding my interviews. Unfortunately, I didn’t receive any detailed feedback.

One possibility I considered was that there might not have been an available position for the particular location/role, especially since the discussion around location had happened during the process. However, I don’t know the actual reason for the rejection, so I don’t want to speculate.

TL;DR:
4 rounds — Machine Coding/LLD → DSA → HLD → Hiring Manager.
Technical rounds were interesting and reasonably challenging, with a strong focus on problem-solving and explaining trade-offs. The overall scheduling and post-interview communication could have been better. Final outcome: Rejected after the Hiring Manager round, without specific feedback.