PayPal Interview Experience for SDE-1 | Off-Campus 2021

PayPal conducted an online campus challenge in 2020, that had programming questions to be solved. Though I wasn’t able to clear the challenge, I received an email from the recruitment team after a year, if I was interested in interviewing. There were 3 rounds:

Round 1(Problem-Solving – Technical Round 1): It was a 60-minute interview on MS Teams. The interviewer was quite friendly, after a brief introduction, he shared google doc for coding. 2 questions were discussed:

1. https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/350800/Google-or-Onsite-or-Chocolate-Sweetness/318561. I suggested possible approaches, but he guided me towards the right direction after which I was able to come up with the binary search approach. Solved and wrote the code, and discussed the time complexity.
2. Given a number N, find the number of integers from 1 to N that have the odd number of factors. Only approach and time complexity were discussed, he seemed satisfied.

Round 2(Projects+Problem Solving): Discussion on projects, open-source contribution, and internships. She asked me what was my individual contribution in each of the projects, and why I used a specific database(MongoDB). After that, 2 questions were discussed.

1. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/minimum-number-of-distinct-elements-after-removing-m-items/. Gave an approach using the map, and discussed corner cases. After reviewing the code I was able to identify mistakes as well. She seemed satisfied.
2. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/reverse-a-list-in-groups-of-given-size/

Round 3(Techno-Managerial Round): This round was with a Senior manager. 

• After a brief introduction, he discussed my projects and internships.
• Then, he asked why I was interested in joining PayPal, the team I’d like to work with, strengths and weaknesses etc. Wasn’t a very pleasant round, he seemed a strict person.
• I had a research internship stated, so wanted to know why I want to work in corporate world.

Tips:

• The only thing is to practice as many questions as you can from GfG, Leetcode, etc.
• Though I had also done PayPal tagged questions from GfG, I wasn’t asked any of them.
• Staying calm and confident during the interview helps a lot.