Cashfree

Role: Software Engineer-1

College: Not Specified (On-Campus drive)

Interview Date: August 2021

Interview Type: On-Campus (6 months + FTE)

Result: Selected

Difficulty: Medium

Rounds: 4 rounds

Topics Asked: Data Structures, Algorithms, Hashmap, Greedy, SQL, DBMS, OS, OOPS, CN, LRU Cache, System Design (DNS, HTTP/S), Managerial

Experience:

Cashfree visited our campus in August 2021 for a 6 months + FTE role for their Bengaluru office. CGPA criteria were 7.5 and above. The whole interview process was smooth, and interviewers were friendly and helpful.

Round 1: Online Coding Round (HackerEarth)

This round had 4 coding questions to be solved within 120 minutes. Two questions were easy, one medium, and one hard. Those who solved 3 questions were shortlisted (around 30 out of 200-220 candidates). One question was hashmap-based, and another used a greedy approach.

Round 2: Technical Interview (Coding and Problem-Solving)

Conducted by an SDE-2, this round focused purely on coding and problem-solving. After an introduction, the interviewer asked if I had any questions. This round lasted for 75 minutes.

Round 3: Technical Interview (Projects and Core Subjects)

This round was conducted by a Senior Engineer with 15 years of experience and focused on internship/project-based discussion and core subjects like OS, DBMS, OOPS, SQL, and CN. Questions included:

• Describe your project in detail and why specific technologies/frameworks were used.
• Do you want to deep dive into a particular technology you are comfortable with?
• What are ACID properties?
• What is inner Join, outer Join?
• Describe LRU cache, its algorithm, implementation approach, and time complexity.
• Why did you use SQL instead of NoSQL in your project?
• Difference between SQL and NoSQL DB.
• How to optimize queries on a database with 100 million rows?
• What are primary key and foreign keys?
• What is indexing?
• What happens in the background if you type cashfree.com in the browser? What is DNS?
• Difference between HTTP and HTTPS?
• What do quad-core, dual-core, octa-core CPU mean?
• What does it mean when we say my PC has 8GB RAM?

This round took 45-50 minutes.

Round 4: Managerial Round

This was a managerial round conducted by a Director-level personnel. 7 students, including the author, received an offer.