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Rejected

SDE-3 at PayPal

Difficulty
Process took
1-2 Weeks
Rounds
5
Format
Remote
Applied via
Company Website

How it went

  • Strong fundamentals, the ability to reason, and demonstrating ownership in your answers are key to cracking these rounds.

What they would tell you

  • Strong fundamentals, the ability to reason, and demonstrating ownership in your answers are key to cracking these rounds.

How to prepare

  • Focus on medium-hard problems, arrays, heaps, dynamic programming, and graphs. Always practice optimizing solutions and explaining your approach
  • Prepare microservice designs

Their background

Role: Senior Software Engineer- Backend Rounds were spaced 1–2 weeks apart, giving time to prepare for the next round

Round by round

  1. 1

    Initial Screening Round60 min

    The recruiter reached out after my application and sent HackerRank link Variation in these Problems Median of Two Sorted Arrays problem Find the longest increasing subsequence in an array Reverse words in a sentence in-place

  2. 2

    Live DSA Round60 min

    This was the first live coding session with two interviewers. Problems:

    • Top K Frequent Elements, had to implement using both a Heap and a HashMap.
    • Matrix Path Sum, find the maximum sum from top-left to bottom-right, moving only down or right.
  3. 3

    System Design60 min

    Problem asked design a mini shopping platform, with Cart management Wishlist functionality Checkout processing

    Follow-up discussions included: Caching strategies Load balancing Handling spikes in traffic

    The expectation was to show: Ability to reason about design trade-offs Understanding of moderate scaling strategies and fault tolerance Clear articulation of data flow and architecture

  4. 4

    Mixed Coding + Design60 min

    This was a hybrid round combining intermediate coding and system design:

    • Small feature development tasks with coding

    • Discussed HLD / LLD for components

    • Scenario questions on REST vs SOAP, scaling, and handling large datasets The round was meant to test:

    • Ability to balance coding with design thinking

    • Efficient problem-solving while discussing trade-offs

  5. 5

    Bar Raiser60 min

    Discussed past projects in depth, including challenges, architecture decisions, and outcomes. Behavioral questions included:

    • Describe a time you disagreed with a peer on design.
    • How do you handle tight deadlines and changing requirements?
    • Mentorship experience and collaboration in teams.

What came up

MediumRemote4 5 years

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

Sources