Backend Engineer at PhonePe

How it went

What they would tell you

How to prepare

Round by round

1. 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. 2

   DSA Round60 min

   • Coin Path
   • Minimum Genetic Mutation
3. 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. 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