Got the offerSDE 2 at Kotak
- Difficulty
- Process took
- 1-2 Weeks
- Rounds
- 3
- Format
- Remote
- Applied via
- Company Website
How it went
- Finally, pacing is key. With mixed rounds of coding, LLD, HLD, and behavioral questions, it’s easy to get stuck on one problem. I practiced full mock rounds under timed conditions so I knew how to switch gears smoothly. And no matter how the questions went, staying calm and explaining your reasoning honestly can leave a strong impression, sometimes that counts as much as the solution itself.
What they would tell you
- Finally, pacing is key. With mixed rounds of coding, LLD, HLD, and behavioral questions, it’s easy to get stuck on one problem. I practiced full mock rounds under timed conditions so I knew how to switch gears smoothly. And no matter how the questions went, staying calm and explaining your reasoning honestly can leave a strong impression, sometimes that counts as much as the solution itself.
How to prepare
- DSA Practice, make sure you’re comfortable with classic problems and different patterns
- Practice designing both low-level (class diagrams, DB schemas) and high-level systems (scalability, messaging, event-driven flows). Clarify requirements before jumping into design.
Round by round
- 1
Bar Raiser Round90 min
This was a detailed round divided into three segments DSA (40 min) Faced a classic 3Sum Closest problem, Focused on implementing an efficient two-pointer solution and discussed time complexity optimization
Low-Level Design (30 minutes) Asked to design a ride-hailing system. Requirements were not provided upfront, so I initiated the discussion by asking clarifying questions. Tip: Prioritize identifying the most essential features to manage time effectively. Focus on core classes (like User, Driver, Ride, Payment) and design database schemas to support key workflows. Where applicable, highlight relevant design patterns (e.g. Singleton, Factory, Observer).
HLD Concepts (20 minutes) Not a full-fledged system design round, but focused on conceptual understanding
- 2
DSA Round60 min
Two dsa problems Number of Ways to Separate Numbers- Given a string num consisting only of digits (from '0' to '9'). You want to determine in how many ways you can split num into a sequence of positive integers and with other constraints Number of Distinct Islands- Given a 2D binary grid, count the number of distinct islands. An island is a group of adjacent 1s (connected horizontally or vertically). Two islands are considered identical if one can be translated (shifted) in the plane to match the other exactly (no rotations/reflections allowed).
- 3
System Design & Behavioral60 min
- System Design: Designed a Unified Logging and Monitoring Pipeline to aggregate logs, metrics, and traces from microservices. The pipeline normalizes and enriches data with contextual metadata (service, region, version) before streaming it to centralized storage such as Elasticsearch or BigQuery, enabling real-time alerting and dashboarding.
- Behavioral: Asked about past technical disagreements, and complex bugs or architectural issues that i have solved, their answers reveal how i balance logic, collaboration, and long-term impact when resolving conflicts or tackling hard problems
What came up
A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.