RejectedBackend Engineer at PhonePe
- Difficulty
- Process took
- 2-3 Weeks
- Rounds
- 4
- Format
- Remote
- Applied via
- Referral
How it went
Before jumping into code or design, take a moment to clarify the requirements, ask questions about edge cases, constraints, and expected behavior
What they would tell you
Before jumping into code or design, take a moment to clarify the requirements, ask questions about edge cases, constraints, and expected behavior
How to prepare
Machine Coding / LLD Practice
- Focus on building small, working systems under time constraints
- Practice problems that involve APIs, classes, interfaces, and concurrency, similar to PhonePe’s LLD round
Round by round
- 1
Machine Coding Round60 min
One of the design questions I was asked, was about building the backend system for PhonePe’s annual hackathon. The event runs for 2 days, and participants compete by solving problems to maximize their total score, either by solving more or by attempting harder ones. I had to outline a scalable backend architecture that could manage submissions, scoring logic, leaderboards, and performance tracking throughout the event.
- 2
DSA Round60 min
- 3
High Level Design Round60 min
The question was to design chrome extension that tracks how long users spend on each website and shows a daily summary report. It should detect active tabs, idle time, and total screen time, then periodically sync the data to a backend service. The backend would store and process summaries to show insights through API's
- 4
HM Round60 min
The interviewer asked me, my toughest project & I shared story about a time when a deployment went wrong and I had to coordinate a rollback across multiple services, he seemed more interested in how I responded than what the problem was.
What came up
A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.