PhonePe Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process
Real candidates share what happened, how many rounds they had,
and how the experience turned out.
Based on 156 interview experiences · FREE TO READ
Candidate interview experiences
First-hand accounts from people who interviewed at PhonePe.
PhonePe
Software Engineer
Mid Average Negative experience No offer 2 rounds
Interview process
Take home Technical screen
Interview formats
Coding Technical
The interview started with a machine coding round where I had to code a Customer Issue Resolution System within 1.5 hours and submit the working solution. This was followed by a 30-minute MC assessment round. In this round, the interviewer had me walk through my code and asked questions about its time complexity, possible enhancements, and my choices of data structures. Even though I felt I answered everything well, the HR later informed me that the panel rejected me and didn't share any feedback.
Confirmed questions5 questions
- Code a Customer Issue Resolution System.
- Explain your approach to implementing the Customer Issue Resolution System.
- What is the time complexity of your solution?
PhonePe
Software Engineer
Intern Difficult Positive experience No offer 4 rounds
Interview process
Take home Technical screen Technical screen Onsite
Interview formats
Coding Coding System Design Behavioral
It started with an online assessment (OA) to weed people out, which was all about Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA). There were 4 questions covering Graphs, DP, and bit manipulation. I managed to get 2 of them fully solved and one partially submitted. After passing that, I was invited for interviews. There were three interviews in total. The first two were also focused on DSA, with questions on topics like Graphs, DP, Tries, and Trees. The final round was a System Design interview, and there was also a quick HR question at the end.
Confirmed questions1 question
- Design the stories feature for Instagram without using any ML models, ensuring that users with whom you interact more frequently appear at the beginning of the stories section.
PhonePe
Software Engineer
Entry Average Neutral experience No offer 5 rounds
Interview process
Technical screen Technical screen Technical screen Technical screen Background check
Interview formats
Coding Technical System Design Behavioral
The PhonePe SDE-1 interview process usually has about 4-5 rounds. They check DSA, system design, problem-solving, and behavioral stuff. Here’s how it goes: 1. Online Coding Round (60-90 mins): 2-3 DSA coding questions on HackerRank/CodeSignal, medium to hard difficulty. Topics include Arrays, Strings, Trees, Graphs, DP, Sliding Window, and Greedy. 2. Technical Round 1 (45-60 mins): Code 1-2 problems on a shared editor, focusing on optimized solutions and complexity discussion. 3. Technical Round 2 (45-60 mins): Focuses on OOP, Design Patterns, and Scalability with problems like designing Splitwise or Uber/Ola's ride matching. 4. Technical Round 3 (45-60 mins, sometimes simplified for SDE-1): System design questions like designing PhonePe's transaction ledger or a notification service. 5. Hiring Manager/Behavioral Round (30-45 mins): Discuss past projects, teamwork, conflict resolution, 'Why PhonePe?', and scenario-based questions.
Confirmed questions8 questions
- Can you design a Trie-based autocomplete system?
- How would you solve the minimum coins problem using DP?
- How do you find the longest substring with K unique characters?
PhonePe Software Engineer Interview Questions
Quoted word for word from PhonePe interview reports.
“What is the length of the longest substring that has at most k characters that are identical, given a string and an integer k?”
Read reports →“Given a binary tree where lighting a node also lights its parent and children, what's the minimum number of bulbs needed to illuminate the entire tree?”
Read reports →“Given a string with parentheses and digits, remove the minimum number of parentheses to make it valid. You can only remove parentheses from the left of the digits, and you can remove at most a specified integer number of parentheses.”
Read reports →“How many numbers can be formed using only 0s and 1s such that there is exactly one occurrence of "00"?”
Read reports →“For an array of strings `arr`, if a string `s` is built by combining a subsequence of `arr` with unique characters, what's the longest possible length of `s`?”
Read report →“How many pairs of 1s are there in a binary 2D matrix such that their distance is d?”
Read report →“Given a bidirectional weighted graph where edge weights represent latency between nodes. Each node has an associated toll. Find a path from node 1 to node n that minimizes the sum of tolls of visited nodes (including source and destination), subject to the constraint that the total latency along the path does not exceed a given value maxL. If multiple paths have the same minimum toll, any one is acceptable. Output -1 if no such path can be found.”
Read report →“Given an array of numbers, what is the maximum number possible after combining them in O(1) time complexity?”
Read report →“If you start at position 0 and can move one step forward or backward, with the step count increasing by one after each move, what is the minimum number of steps to reach a given integer n?”
Read report →Formats, difficulty and experience
Across all 156 PhonePe interview reports.