CRED Interview Experience for SDE

Education: Fresher 2022 pass out.
Experience: 2+ years of Internship experience at MNCs and Startups. Both as Android + Backend developers. Currently interning at unicorn startup.

Role: SDE (Android Developer)
Job Posting: Seen an opening on LinkedIn jobs and applied there. Got a call back in a day and started with the assignment after a short discussion.

Hiring Process:

Round 1 – Assignment: Just after the call from HR. In no time I got an assignment that should be finished and the codebase should be shared in 24hrs. The assignment is on developing POC on Animation heavy features using Android native following all the Clean Architecture practices. It’s a full-on project including handling API calls and view persistence

Round 2 – DSA & Puzzles(1.5hrs): Just after my assignment submission in no time, my next interview is scheduled for the following day. This was on DSA and Puzzle-solving Started with the basics and later moved to various data structures. Most of them are on the Medium Level. Code will be written in google docs and not in any IDE. So they check your approach and the way you go with explaining your solution.

Round 3 – Core Android(2.5hrs): Again no time is given, within a day gap the next round is scheduled. This is completely on Core Android Fundamentals. Starting from basic lifecycle-based questions to grilling on Clean Architecture, they covered every part. There is also a part where you need to do an HLD for an app, and questions will be again asked based on your approach. This round went more like a discussion instead of 1 on 1 QnA session. So what they see is how well you can pick things and move forward as they add up more and more complexities to the same situation.

Round 4 – System Design + Managerial(1.5hrs): This happened with the Head of Engineering Mobile. More like a cultural fit round, but can expect a technical touch. A good discussion on experience. How I was handling stuff at each of the workplaces and how did they differ based on the scale they operate. Basically to understand the roles I played apart from just being a software developer. Then took up a mobile system design problem. Where I was asked to build Analytics SDK. You need to speak out loud about what you are thinking and the interviewer will add questions in between. Later it was on self-awareness and other stuff to understand the career goals. Which looks simple but is the hardest part of the whole interview process. Questions were around the reason for moving to android from the backend and things which I work on, apart from tech.
Later that day, I got the confirmation from HR that I am selected.

Overall, the hiring process is unique in itself. All the rounds test your development skills rather than just grilling on DSA. For every round, there are two interviewers in the panel and they made sure it was a discussion rather than just a QnA session.