PhonePe SDE Interview Experience | 3+ YOE
Recently interviewed for the Software Engineer role at PhonePe and got selected, so sharing my experience.
The process started with a machine coding assignment to design and implement a ship battle game, followed by a discussion around the implementation and design choices.
The DSA round had multiple questions on Top View of a Binary Tree, a bipartite graph coloring problem where A-B, B-C, C-D relationships were given and connected people couldn’t sit together, and a matrix transformation problem which can be solved using next greater element concept.
For system design, it was an HLD round where I was given options like Distributed Scheduler, Rate Limiter/Circuit Breaker and Booking System. I chose Rate Limiter, and we went deep into scalability, concurrency, Redis, token bucket, atomic operations and trade-offs.
The HM round was mostly around my projects high-level design, why/how I made certain decisions, trade-offs, retry mechanisms, challenging on-call issues, mentoring juniors, PR reviews, documentation and how I use AI to improve productivity.
There were also questions around how quickly I could onboard at PhonePe.
Overall, the interviews were quite deep and focused a lot on the what, how and why behind the work mentioned in my resume.
Verdict: Selected
Updating comp:
Basic 27 lacs
Esops 35 lacs(25% each year)
Signing 4 lacs