Software Engineer at IDFC First Bank

How it went

What they would tell you

How to prepare

Their background

Round by round

1. 1

   Coding/Technical Screening60 min

   The interview started with a coding question about arrays and how to count things using hashmaps. I took a moment to check if I understood what they wanted, then explained my solution step by step. Next, they gave me a short SQL question. It was about using joins and group-by, nothing too hard, just a good way to show I could work with databases. At the end, they asked me some basic questions about Java, focusing on OOPs and inheritance. The whole conversation felt friendly and relaxed, more like a discussion than a test, which made me feel comfortable.

2. 2

   Technical Round 160 min

   The first face-to-face round started with an interesting coding challenge. The interviewer handed me 5 cards, each given as a string in the "3-H" format (like "3 of Hearts"), and asked me to write logic to find out which card is the highest. I immediately clarified the order of card values (Jack, Queen, King, Ace, etc.) and then mapped out my approach. It felt almost like a fun puzzle, much lighter in tone than some grueling layout rounds I’d seen before. I reflected later that attention to edge cases and proper value mapping really matters in these rounds.

   • Card Value Problem
3. 3

   System Design60 min

   This round was split into two parts: a. Logging System Design They wanted me to design a logging system that could store logs for a year, but with a twist: I couldn’t use any cloud services. I went for a practical, disk-based approach. My suggestion was to keep writing logs to files, and once a file got too big, rotate it to a new file. For older logs, I proposed compressing the files and storing them on disk to save space. To manage the retention policy, I added that we could run scheduled jobs to automatically delete logs that were more than a year old. The interviewer seemed pretty focused on the nitty gritty of file storage and clean-up policies. b. Lift Class: move() Implementation The second half dove into a classic LLD-style problem: writing a move() method for a Lift class to tell the sensor whether to go up or down. I kept it simple, check the current floor against the destination, then return the direction accordingly. This wasn’t a flashy problem, but it was more about seeing if I could think clearly and code up a logical, bug-free solution under pressure.

What came up