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Rejected

SSE-2(Senior Software Engineer) at MakeMyTrip

Difficulty
Process took
1-2 Weeks
Rounds
3
Format
Remote
Applied via
Company Website

How it went

  • Stay curious. In design or backend discussions, asking questions like "Should the service be stateful?" or "Is latency or cost more critical here?" shows you're thinking like a builder, not just a coder.

What they would tell you

  • Stay curious. In design or backend discussions, asking questions like "Should the service be stateful?" or "Is latency or cost more critical here?" shows you're thinking like a builder, not just a coder.

How to prepare

  • In rounds like browser navigation or DSA problems, don’t rush to code. Just pause and say, “Let me first walk you through how I’m thinking.”
  • It buys you time, and more importantly, it gives the interviewer confidence that you know what you’re doing.

Round by round

  1. 1

    DSA + Tech Stack60 min

    The interview began with a short intro followed by a DSA question on strings. I was asked to solve similar question like Group Anagrams. After the problem, the focus shifted to Redis, something I had mentioned on my resume. The interviewer asked in-depth conceptual questions about:

    • Use cases of Redis
    • Persistence models (RDB vs AOF)
    • Caching strategies
  2. 2

    Core Backend + Functional Problem60 min

    This round was extremely balanced and enjoyable. It began with an in-depth technical discussion on:

    • Java concurrency, collections, and memory model
    • Golang basics (I had listed it as secondary language)
    • Kubernetes deployment model and pod orchestration Following that, I was asked to implement the browser back/forward navigation system using stacks.
  3. 3

    Director Round (Design + Open Discussion)75 min

    It started with a very open-ended and unexpected question

    • "How has GenAI improved your productivity? Give me a percentage." Some follow-up question like “Do you know how LLMs work internally?” Then came the core design task "Design a pass-through service that can dynamically configure and call third-party APIs." I proposed a design similar to Kubernetes Ingress, highlighting routing, service discovery, and pluggable middleware. The interviewer then asked me to:

    • Implement it using Java

    • Use HttpUrlConnection API to hit dynamic endpoints

    • Test the service end-to-end Verdict: Haven’t heard back, assuming rejection

What came up

MediumRemote4 5 years

A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.

Sources