Paytm visited our campus on 15th September 2021 for Software Engineer role. Branches eligible are CS and EE from B.Tech and CS and MnC (Mathematics and Computing) from MTech. A total of 4 rounds took place and 71 students applied for it.
Round 1(Coding Round): This round is an online round conducted on CoCubes platform. It took place for 70 minutes and 3 coding questions were given. Everyone got different questions and here are the questions that I got:
- Variant of rotten oranges problem: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/minimum-time-required-so-that-all-oranges-become-rotten/amp/
- Remove last k nodes of linked list and insert them after nth node from beginning, provided n+k <= Number of Nodes in linked list. Example: I/P: 1->2->3->4->5->6->7->8, k = 3, n = 4, O/P: 1->2->3->4->6->7->8->5
- Alternate level order sum: Given a binary tree, find the sum of all the nodes at alternate levels. Root node is at level 0 and alternate level includes nodes present at level 0, level 2, level 4,..
People who were able to solve all three questions correctly and had a cpi greater than 7.5 were shortlisted for the interviews.
Round 2(Technical Round – 1 ): A total of 26 people were shortlisted for the interviews. Interviews were conducted on Google Meet platform on 18th September. My interview started with my introduction and then he moves to the questions:
- What are all the sorting algorithms that you know?
- Which sorting algorithms are the best among merge sort and heap sort and why?
- Reverse an n-ary tree: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/mirror-of-n-ary-tree/amp/
- Missing number in an arithmetic progression: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-missing-number-arithmetic-progression/amp/. At first, I gave him an O(N) solution, he said to optimize it and gave hint that the array is sorted. I got the idea of binary search and I was able to write the complete working code for it.
After 5 minutes, I got the information that I am shortlisted for Round-2.
Round 3(Technical Round – 2): A total of 23 people were shortlisted for this round. It was also conducted on Google Meet platform. My interviewer introduced himself, asked for my introduction, and said that this round would focus only on projects. I had only one project related to word clustering (data science) and he moves to questions:
- Explain your project in brief
- What is word clustering?
- What is cosine similarity and how did you calculate it?
- What did you do when you couldn’t categorize a word into any of the cluster?
- What are the real-time applications of this project? How does this project add value to Paytm?
- Was the project your own idea or a course project? Did you do it on your own or is it a team project?
After some follow up questions for my answers, he moved to the following questions:
- Why do you want to join Paytm?
- What value do you bring to Paytm?
- Suppose I give a project and a deadline of two months, explain your complete workflow for these two months
- Do you have any questions for me?
This round went on for 25 minutes and after 2 hours, I got the information that I am shortlisted for HR Round
Round 4(HR Round): A total of 15 people were selected for HR Round. It was telephonic and she asked the following questions:
- Introduce yourself
- How was your interview experience today?
- What is the full form of Paytm?
- What do you know about Paytm ?
- What are your strengths and weaknesses?
- What are your hobbies?
- What is your preferred work location?
This round lasted for 5 minutes.
Verdict: Rejected
A total of 7 people were given the offers and I was not one of them.
Tips:
- Have at least two good projects and know them completely. When any question is asked on projects, answer them correctly and confidently
- Also try to have basic knowledge of OOPs, OS, and DBMS. Being from the non-CS background, I couldn’t study these subjects due to which all the questions in the technical round – 2 were focused only on my project.
- Prepare for typical HR round questions. I was rejected because I didn’t prepare these HR round questions and stammered while answering these questions. For Paytm, questions like Who is the CEO of Paytm, When is Paytm established are asked to others, and just have a look at these facts before the HR round.