Multi-company post; Zomato: take-home Course Management machine coding, then DSA+SQL round via 3rd party

Education: BE CS [Last Tier College in India]
Experience: 3+
Location: India
Timeline: 5 months in 2023
Position: SE2 (or equivalent)

Disclaimer
The purpose of this post is not to disclose the exact questions but to help others keep informed about what are the recent trends in interviews at the aforementioned companies. By recent trends, I mean level of difficulty of questions, topics, and popularity.

Giving away exact questions would be an unfair thing

• For interviewers who have to spend time to find and prepare questions to do a sound technical assessment of the interviewee's skills in a very limited period of time.
• For those who work hard to prepare for the interviews and those who don't pass by this post. The ones getting the questions by this post may have an unfair advantage over others as mentioned.

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Amazon [1st attempt; applied directly on careers site]

• OA: Two LC medium; didn't solve any completely, 14/15 passed test cases in one, 8/15 passed test cases in other
• Result: Failed

PayPal [Applied directly on careers site]:

• Round 1[DSA]: Array (Maths based) + Java fundamentals (LC easy to medium)
• Round 2[DSA + Java]: Array (LC easy) + Brain teaser puzzle (hard)
• Round 3: HM round
• Result: Pass, declined offer.

Amazon [2nd attempt; Recruiter reached out based on 1st attempt OA score, after 2 weeks of 1st attempt]

• Round 1[DSA]: Trie Insert + Search (Not simple search) (LC medium to hard)
• Round 2[LLD]: haven't been able to yet figure out the design pattern that could be used in the solution (Hard)
• Result: Failed due to LLD, very positive in DSA

Groww [Applied directly on careers site]:

• Round 1[DSA]: Very famous interval problem + same problem as in PayPal round 1 (LC easy to medium)
• Round 2[Data domain]: Spark programming + data engineering domain questions
• Round 3[System design]: System related to one of the functionalities of Groww (Hint: this is a common functionality across most mobile apps)
• Result: Failed in round 2, round 3

PhonePe [Sent cold emails to recruiters, one of the recruiters referred to another recruiter who was hiring]:

• Round 1[Machine Coding]: Payment Gateway
• Result: Failed

Paytm [Applied directly on careers site via LinkedIn]

• OA: 3 LC Medium to Hard
• Result: Failed, couldn't solve any

Cloudera [Applied directly on careers site]

• Round 1[DSA]: Git + Java basics, TreeMap/Priority Queue problem (LC easy to medium)
• Round 2[DSA + HM]: Past experience, Stack + Tree (LC medium)
• Round 3[DSA]: Shortest path with a twist [LC medium, other platform hard - This should actually be an hard in LC as well]
• Result: Pass, offer rescinded.

Zomato [Applied through 3rd party via LinkedIn]:

• Round 1[Take home assignment Machine Coding]: Course Management
• Round 2[DSA + SQL]: (Taken by 3rd party) Graph - shortest path, basic SQL
• Result: Failed due to interviewer's incompetence (interviewer had one answer prepared in mind, and lacked knowledge to understand other and even better ways to solve the given problems)

Wayfair [Applied directly on careers site via LinkedIn]:

• Round 1[DSA]: Very famous tree traversal question that could be found in other Wayfair experience posts too.
• Result: Ghosted

Nutanix [Arranged employee referral through Blind]:

• Round 1[DSA]: Matrix (Easy to solve, difficult to optimize; LC easy to medium)
• Round 2[DSA]: Binary search (LC medium; not so intuitive)
• Round 3[DSA]: Very famous textbook problem on tree traversal (DFS) + DP based very famous textbook problem (LC medium)
• Result: Rejected, positive feedback, but they proceeded with a better candidate.

Ecommerce Startup, Orange color logo, Gurugram based [Not naming as they don't interview many and do not wish to lose anonymity; applied on Instahyre]

• Round 1[CTO]: Past experiences + basic coding
• Round 2[DSA]: Palindrome, Fibonacci (+ optimization in Fibonacci)
• Round 3[LLD]: Sudoku
• Round 4[DSA]: Reservoir sampling (LC medium)
• Round 5: Cultural fitment
• Result: Passed, declined offer.

Amazon [3rd attempt; Recruiter reached out based on 1st attempt OA score, after 7 weeks of 2nd attempt]

• Round 1[DSA]: Extremely famous doubly linked list + map problem [LC medium]
• Round 2[LLD]: Adapter pattern + Composite pattern
• Round 3[HLD + HM]: Graph + DP (LC medium to hard), very famous system design question (Hint: This question is a type of question that can be asked in HLD as well LLD too, not many such famous questions are there)
• Result: Failed because of round 2 and 3, extremely positive in round 1 (Round 2: solved the problem but didn't follow good coding conventions - access modifiers missing, bad naming, interface implements interface instead of extends; Round 3: failure to do capacity estimation, couldn't communicate ideas proactively, HM needed to ask questions to get answers from me)