Flipkart Interview Experience For Summer Internship (Off- Campus)

Registration

The Flipkart grid 5.0 registration began in June 2023 till mid-July 2023. There were two quiz rounds held on Unstop each with 25 questions on DS, core CS subjects and languages like Python, Java, C++. Since our team participated in Information Security and Software Development tracks, some question on web3 and network security were also asked. Each question had an individual timer of 60s on it.

Hackathon

We aced the quiz rounds easily, then project submission round was there. In that, we need to select a topic out of 3 given topics and made a prototype to submit within 2 weeks along with our idea. We didn’t proceed after this but everyone who reached till here got an OA link from Flipkart after filling a form. My 2 team members already had on-campus offers from GS and Cisco, so I was the only one to appear for the OA.

Online Assessment

There were 3 questions for 1 hour 30 mins. Two were implementation based requiring sorting and maps to do proper ordering. They were medium with 1-2 edge cases. The third question was a variation of cherry pickup problem. I was able to solve all 3 fortunately.

https://leetcode.com/problems/cherry-pickup-ii/description/

Now the OA happened in September last week and I got to know that I cleared the OA during mid-October. From there my interview got rescheduled multiple times due to unavailability of panel, end-semester exams of colleges and so on. After December, I had given up hope of giving any interview 🙂

Interview

But finally, my first round occurred in January mid. It was a pure DS and algo round of 1hr. Interviewer was really friendly and made me comfortable first. He was a SDE 2 with 3 years of experience. He asked me a spin-off of the snake and ladder problem.

https://leetcode.com/problems/snakes-and-ladders/description/

Now since I had given up hope of any interview and the internship season practically over, I was quite out of touch with DSA. So, I first told him about my thought process which indicated towards a DP approach which was wrong due to cyclic dependencies. After this, my LAN connection went off(just IIIT A things). I was like, it’s gone. Then when I came back, I apologized a lot, and he told me not to worry. He told me to code up my thoughts. After coding up, he gave me some test cases to run which helped me in finding that my approach was wrong. Then I quickly explained him the problem in my approach and then proposed a new BFS approach. He was satisfied and appreciated me for catching on. Now told me to code up this again. Now the problem was 15 minutes remaining, and my lack of practice was quite visible in my speed. I somehow code it correctly just on time, but he seemed pleased with me.

From that day, I practiced quite hard till the 2nd round. Yeah, I somehow made through the 1st round. I got a week to practice which I am quite thankful for.

The next round was again pure DS based. This time I borrowed 5g phone from my friend to give interview, no trust on LAN. Again, my interviewer was a SDE2 from Flipkart.

He gave a quick intro about him and then asked me the question:

https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/670480/curefit-right-most-node-in-last-level-of-complete-binary-tree

I started with brute force and coded it. He asked me a few basic tree properties in between and then went on to explain the optimal method and code it.

Then in 2nd question, there was a hard variation of word break II.

https://leetcode.com/problems/word-break-ii/

• He told me to first write code, then explain it. I did as i asked.
• He asked me a few questions based on my implementation after that which he was quite satisfied.
• Then he asked me if I had some questions for him. I was sure I aced this round.

After weekend on 29th January, I finally got a 2months internship offer from Flipkart. After earlier rejections in CureFit and Cisco, I was quite demotivated, but I bounced back.

So, I will advise you all to keep working hard. You will get result one day for sure.