Phonepe

I appeared for the PhonePe SDE Intern + FTE process during the campus hiring drive. The selection process had four rounds in total, including the online assessment. Online Assessment The OA consisted of 4 DSA problems to be solved in 90 minutes. The questions were mostly competitive-programming oriented, so simply knowing standard LeetCode patterns wasn't always enough. One of the problems was the PAKMEN problem from Codeforces, which is rated around 1800. The difficulty of the assessment made time management extremely important. I focused on solving the problems I was most confident about first and then spent the remaining time on the harder ones. After the assessment, around 30 students were shortlisted for the interview rounds. Technical Round 1 The first technical interview lasted around an hour and was conducted in person. The interviewer started directly with DSA. I was given two coding problems and had to explain my approach before writing the implementation. The questions required me to think about the constraints carefully rather than jumping straight to brute force. For each problem, the interviewer asked about the time and space complexity and also discussed possible alternative approaches. The interaction was quite collaborative. Whenever I reached an incorrect approach, the interviewer asked questions that helped me reconsider the solution instead of immediately giving away the answer. I was able to solve both problems and was shortlisted for the second technical round. Technical Round 2 The second technical round again lasted approximately an hour and consisted of two DSA problems. This round felt slightly more challenging. The interviewer focused heavily on my reasoning and asked several follow-up questions after I reached the initial solution. I had to explain why my approach would work for edge cases and how the complexity would behave for larger constraints. The interview was almost entirely problem-solving oriented, with very little time spent on anything outside DSA. After completing the round, I was informed that I had cleared the technical interviews. Hiring Manager Round The final round was with the hiring manager and was different from the previous two rounds. The discussion focused mainly on projects, motivation and behavioral questions. I was asked to explain some of the projects mentioned on my resume and discuss the technical decisions I had made while building them. The interviewer also asked questions around teamwork, challenges I had faced while working on projects and how I approached situations where something didn't work as expected. There were also some standard HR questions about why I wanted to join PhonePe and what kind of work I was interested in. After completing the final round, I received the confirmation that I had been selected for the SDE Intern + FTE opportunity. The complete process was: OA → Technical Round 1 → Technical Round 2 → Hiring Manager → Selected The biggest takeaway for me was that PhonePe's process was heavily focused on DSA during the technical rounds. The problems were closer to competitive programming than basic interview questions, so being comfortable with medium-to-hard problems and explaining the thought process clearly made a big difference.