Backend Engineer (SDE 2) at Vegapay
- Difficulty
- Process took
- 1-2 Weeks
- Rounds
- 2
- Format
- Remote
- Applied via
- Job Portal
How it went
Stay calm during the interview and do not rush your answers. Take a moment to think before you speak or start coding. It is completely fine to pause, gather your thoughts, and then explain your approach. If you want to crack Vegapay Technologies, make Low Level Design a priority in your preparation. Practice it a lot, along with coding and system design, so that you feel confident when similar problems appear in the interview.
What they would tell you
Stay calm during the interview and do not rush your answers. Take a moment to think before you speak or start coding. It is completely fine to pause, gather your thoughts, and then explain your approach. If you want to crack Vegapay Technologies, make Low Level Design a priority in your preparation. Practice it a lot, along with coding and system design, so that you feel confident when similar problems appear in the interview.
How to prepare
Based on my experience, here are a few things that can help you prepare effectively:
- Practice Easy to Medium LeetCode Problems
- Build comfort with common patterns like two pointers, stacks, trees, graphs, and dynamic programming. These are the types of questions that usually appear in coding rounds.
- Strengthen Both High Level and Low Level Design
- Make sure you understand the fundamentals of system design.
- High Level Design covers components, data flow, communication, scaling, and storage.
- Low Level Design focuses on classes, interfaces, interactions, and real world constraints.
- Get Familiar With Excalidraw or Similar Whiteboarding Tools
- Vegapay conducts design rounds on Excalidraw. Being comfortable with the tool helps you focus on the design rather than fighting the interface.
- Prepare Extra for the Design Round
- Round 2 is the real filter. It is more challenging and tests your ability to reason about systems in detail. Spend dedicated time practicing LLD scenarios, backend workflows, and real time systems.
- Vegapay Is a Product Based Company That Expects Strong Technical Expertise
- They look for candidates who can think deeply about architecture, scalability, reliability, and code structure. Strong fundamentals matter a lot here.
Their background
Software Engineer with expertise in AI/ML tooling and developer productivity. Built AnalytiQ (data quality & AutoML platform with GenAI), Prompt ACE (Chrome extension for prompt management), and sfinance (PyPI package for financial data extraction). Passionate about creating practical tools that streamline workflows, from data preprocessing to AI-powered enhancements
Round by round
- 1
L160 min
This round started with a brief introduction, followed by a discussion about my day-to-day responsibilities and the overall scope of my work. After that, the interviewer moved to the problem “Validate Parentheses String with Wildcards.” I explained the easier version of the problem that I had solved earlier and walked through my initial approach. Once the discussion wrapped up, I wrote the solution for the simpler variant and then talked about how it could be extended to handle the wildcard case. I initially struggled to reach a complete solution, especially because the interviewer asked me to work without a code editor and write everything directly in Google Docs without running it. This made the problem a bit tougher. However, the interviewer was very supportive and gave me time to think. Because of that, I was comfortable enough to reason through the problem and eventually arrive at a correct approach. Overall, it was a challenging but positive round, and I was able to clear it.
- 2
L2 (Low Level Design)60 min
This round began with introductions, after which the interviewer presented a Low Level Design problem. The task was to design a backend system for a VOIP calling platform with the following features:
- Users should be able to call each other over VOIP
- Call routing and call forwarding
- Per second billing for calls The non functional requirements included handling 50 million daily active users, supporting up to 2 million peak concurrent users, keeping latency under 100 milliseconds, and ensuring high scalability and availability as a SAAS service. I was not fully prepared for Low Level Design questions. I walked the interviewer through a High Level Design approach, but I struggled to break it down into a proper Low Level Design. The interview was conducted using Excalidraw, which I was not familiar with, and that added to the difficulty. Because of this unfamiliarity, I was not able to structure the detailed design effectively. Overall, this round did not go as well, but it helped me identify the gaps in my LLD preparation and the tools I need to practice with.
What came up
A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.