Kotak Mahindra Interview Experience For SDE-1 2024

Previous Position – Software Engineer II

Previous Organisation – Sabre

Location – Bengaluru, India

Years of Experience – 1.5 years of Experience

I Applied through referral.

Telephonic Conversation with HR (5-10 mins)

HR asked a few questions about the current organization – CTC drawn, tech stack, reason for switch etc.

He told me that according to their company standards, my years of experience were less for SDE-2 So, I’d be fine to go for the SDE-1 role. I agreed on it.

HR explained the interview process – 3 Technical Rounds

• Technical Round 1 – Bar Raiser (3rd party)
• Technical Round 2 – Coding
• Technical Round 3 – LLD

I asked HR about the barraiser round – So, and he said it will revolve around the DSA and CS fundamentals.

Technical Round-1 (Bar Raiser): (1.5 hr)

The interviewer was a senior developer with 8 YOE.

• He started explaining the process of the interview.
• He said he’ll ask for 1 DSA problem and 1 Design problem giving 45 mins to each.
• I was a bit surprised by the design problem as it was not expected in this round.
• Then, he went straight to problem-solving and asked me to solve it on my IDE from scratch.

Problem (LC- Medium): https://leetcode.com/problems/merge-intervals/description/

• He explained the problem to me and gave me some time to think about the approach.
• I explained my approach first and started coding the solution.
• After coding the solution, he said to run it with some sample inputs.
• The solution gave the correct output.
• So, he asked me about the time and space complexity analysis of the solution.
• After this, he jumped to designing the problem – Designing a cab booking service similar to OLA/Uber.
• He said that he is more interested in the API designs and DB designs. He was not looking for any coding solution for it.
• He started giving me some API examples to incorporate.
• I explained to him all the flow and designed all the API
• At last, we discussed about the DB Schema.
• Reason to choose SQL database and discussion on ACID properties.

We could finish the interview at exactly 1.5 hr. The interviewer was a very kind person and gave me ample amount of time to think and come up with a solution.

Technical Round-2 : (1 hr)

Interviewer was a SDE 3 in Kotak.

• We had a very in-depth discussion on the previous project in the company for around 20-25 minutes.
• He was from a Java and Spring background, so he was diving into my previous project.
• There were questions from Microservices, Database, API etc.
• After that, he started asking questions from JAVA.
• Implementation of HashMap in Java Collections framework – what are collisions, loading factor etc?
• How to make a class immutable? – using the final keyword
• Difference between method overloading and overriding?
• Inheritance

Then he jumped to Problem-solving-

Problem: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-a-peak-in-a-given-array/

• I was asked to code it in my IDE.
• I gave the solution O(n) time complexity and ran the sample cases.
• He asked if I could optimize it further.
• I explained the approach of using binary search and optimizing it to O(log n)
• But since we were out of time so, he concluded the interview there itself.

Feedback: I believe my interview went quite well and was expecting to be shortlisted for the next round. But to my great surprise when I contacted HR the next day, it was a rejection.

He didn’t give me proper feedback and just said that the interviewer didn’t feel your technical skills matched the expectations for the profile.

This was weird as I still can’t decipher what went wrong in Round 2.