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

Swiggy Interview Experience for Software Development Engineer I-Backend role.

Current state: I have a 6 months internship experience from Quantiphi. Currently working as a full-time Framework Engineer at Quantiphi (with 4 months of full-time experience).

Round 1(Online Assessment): I received the online test link.

• Platform: Hackerrank
• Duration: 75 minutes
• 3 Coding questions: 1 Easy, 1 Medium, 1 Hard

Got selected in this round. Within 1 week after the test, I got a call from HR and we had a discussion about the further rounds.

Round 2(Machine Coding Round): Got the mail about the next round as Machine Coding Round. The mail had no specific details about the round. (I thought it would be a normal DSA round!). I mailed the technical recruiter about the round specific doubts. Got no replies! I had to go through the glassdoor interviews, GFG archives.

• Platform: Any offline code editor with screen shared
• Duration: 120 minutes
• 4 interviewers
• Question: Design a Snake and Ladder Game with working code

It was a design question (I was prepared for this!). I was expected to come up with an approach to different classes, Object Oriented approach was expected. The question had 2 sets of requirements (Mandatory requirements + Optional requirements). The main aim was to write a code that covered all the mandatory requirements, the code should be extensible to do optional requirements too!

Solved the problem in following order;

• 10 minutes: Reading the question and the requirements
• 15 – 20 minutes: Discussion about my approach, different classes (Player, Game, Board etc.), approach to handling all the mandatory requirements one by one, clarifications about my doubts and assumptions.
• They gave me 60 minutes to code. After that, they said they will evaluate the code.
• I completed the entire working code in 45 minutes!
• I run the code, debugged it, and it passed the test cases!

Here comes the optional requirements!

• Make the game playable for any N (and not just N = 100).
• Make the game playable for any number of players (and not just M = 6).
• There can be a ladder at the tail of snake (after being eaten by snake, ladder can be there to climb up).
• There can be a snake at the end of a ladder (after climbing the ladder, the snake can eat and drop at some other point).
• The game can run until all the players has reached the winning point (Point 100).

Solved the optional requirements too! I asked questions about roles and company in general, life of an SDE etc. The interviewers were very friendly and we discussed every possible approach that came to my mind, the edge cases etc.

Got a call from the HR around half an hour after the interview was completed. She said that I did well! We had discussions about the next round and got it scheduled 2 days later.

Round 3(Problem Solving / DS Algo Round): Got the DS Algo round scheduled 2 days later.

• Platform: Any online ide, then he said GFG IDE!
• Duration: 60 minutes
• 3 Coding questions (I was expecting two)!
• Total number of possible Binary Search Trees for a given N: Solved it using Catalan number. He made me walk through the code and explain the approach. He then asked me to run the code for different test cases.
• Lowest Common Ancestor in a Binary Tree: I gave him O(N) approach, did the coding and then he gave me his own test cases. Run the code and it worked! We did a discussion about the O(log N) approach in case of a BST.

I was happy as I was able to solve both the problems fully correct and I thought we were done! 10-15 minutes remaining and he pasted another LeetCode medium!

• Gas Station(https://leetcode.com/problems/gas-station/): I gave a brute force O(N^2) solution, he seemed fine, asked me if I can do better. I explained him the linear time solution with two pointers. He was satisfied.

Time was up. I asked him some quick role related questions.

Got a call from the HR around half an hour after the interview was completed. The next round was scheduled the next day!

Round 4(Hiring Manager Round): The hiring manager was very much experienced (Director of Engineering at Swiggy, YES I searched her on LinkedIn before the interviews). I had mixed feelings about what she will ask. Whether to do OS or DBMS or OOPs!

• Duration 60 minutes
• She asked about my experience during the internship at Quantiphi my role, my contributions, tech stacks used etc.
• We had discussions about my full time role at Quantiphi, my contributions, what SDLC model we follow (I told her Agile).
• Then she asked about my college projects. I explained all the three projects mentioned in my resume.
• She asked, Why do you want to switch so early? It’s just been around 4 months? (Be prepared for these type of questions. I had a very clear answer in my mind for this)!
• Now it was my turn to ask the questions (I already had a list of them)!
• I asked her about Swiggy Instamart and Swiggy Genie.
• I asked about the Swiggy Cloud Kitchen.
• I asked her about the work mode, the office openings, given the fact about the new COVID strain.
• Then we had some discussions about the competition. Swiggy vs Zomato!

The interaction was really amazing, and I was having a good feeling about this!

Got a call from the HR 2 days later. Congratulations, you are SELECTED! She said.