Saw this Amazon SDE-1 comp post and thought it was worth sharing here.

Context: 2026 CSE batch, Tier-1 college, 6-month internship at Amazon, converted to PPO.

Offer details

Component	Amount
Company	Amazon
Role	SDE-1
Base pay	₹19.17L
Sign-on bonus — Year 1	₹6.47L
Sign-on bonus — Year 2	₹5.18L
RSUs	₹15.56L over 4 years
RSU vesting	5%, 15%, 45%, 35%
Relocation	₹1.5L one-time
Total CTC	~₹48L

Other perks mentioned

• Home internet reimbursement: ₹1,250/month
• Meal card: ₹1,100/month
• Free annual health check
• Transportation facility: ₹4,000/month, charged

Interesting to compare this with recent Amazon SDE-2 offers.

SDE-1 PPO:

• ₹19.17L base
• ~₹48L total CTC
• backloaded RSU vesting

Recent SDE-2 datapoints we’ve seen were more like:

• ₹42–45L base
• ~₹57–65L first-year CTC

Saw this Microsoft L62 offer and thought it was worth posting here for comp benchmarking.

Candidate context: ~4 YOE, Tier 1.5/2 CSE, currently at a SaaS CXM company. Current CTC was ₹45L fixed.

Microsoft offer

Component	Amount
Level	SDE-2 / L62
Location	Hyderabad
Base	₹40L
Stock	$90k over 4 years
Stock vesting	25% each year
Performance bonus	Up to 20%, average ~10%
Sign-on bonus	₹6L first year, ₹4L second year
Relocation	As per policy

Estimated CTC

Year	Approx CTC
Year 1	~₹70 LPA
Year 2	~₹68 LPA + appraisal

Rough first-year math:

₹40L base + ~₹4L performance bonus + ₹6L sign-on + ~₹20L stock = ~₹70L first-year CTC

• How does Microsoft L62 compare with Amazon SDE-2 / Salesforce MTS offers in India?

https://preview.redd.it/3s6qg1q6vifh1.png?width=668&format=png&auto=webp&s=1c0722203e9ee17c482fb7d6162fa147061843ba

Saw this Target L5 offer and thought it was worth posting here.

Candidate context: ~6 YOE, Tier 2 CSE, currently at Salesforce. Current comp is ₹34 LPA fixed + 10% bonus + $60k RSUs.

Current compensation

Component	Amount
Base / fixed	₹34 LPA
Bonus	10%
RSUs	$60k

Target offer

Component	Amount
Base	₹49 LPA
Bonus	10%
Sign-on bonus	₹3L
Stocks	$40k over 3 years
Approx first-year stock value	~₹12L
First-year CTC	~₹70 LPA

Rough first-year math:

₹49L base + ~₹4.9L bonus + ₹3L sign-on + ~₹12L stock = ~₹70L first-year CTC

https://preview.redd.it/ipqeu04yckeh1.png?width=655&format=png&auto=webp&s=4041bba4420c1b00cf962b4a25e9fd1f7d273530

>Archived interview report, structured for this sub. Details preserved where available.

Quick context

Amazon SDE-2 / L5 offer from Bangalore.

2.5 YOE. Current CTC was ₹30.25L. No competing offer and no negotiation.

Final first-year CTC: ₹57L.

The loop had:

• coding assessment
• 2 DSA rounds
• 1 system design round
• 1 Bar Raiser round focused on LLD / maintainable code
• final HM alignment discussion

every round had Leadership Principle discussion

Background

Field	Details
Role	SDE-2 / L5
Location	Bangalore
Experience	2.5 YOE
Education	BTech + Masters from Tier-1 colleges
Current CTC	₹30.25L

2.5 YOE for SDE-2/L5 is probably the part most people will notice here.

Round 1 — Coding

Two questions.

Q1 — Binary Search on Answer

Variation of the classic Allocate Books / Minimum Capacity type problem.

Given some workload and a time constraint, find the minimum pace/capacity needed to finish within the given timeframe.

Core idea:

• binary search on possible pace/capacity
• write a feasibility check
• minimize the valid answer

Q2 — Backtracking / Power Set

Generate all subsets of a given set.

Standard backtracking / recursion problem.

LPs discussed:

• Ownership
• Overcoming obstacles

Round 2 — Coding

Two questions.

Q1 — 1D Dynamic Programming

Linear optimization problem similar to House Robber.

Expected to explain:

• recurrence
• top-down vs bottom-up
• time complexity
• space complexity

Q2 — Graph / Topological Sort

Dependency-resolution problem similar to Course Schedule.

Core idea:

• model dependencies as a directed graph
• detect cycles
• use traversal / topological ordering

LPs discussed:

• Insist on the Highest Standards
• Deliver Results

Round 3 — System Design

Prompt:

Design a secure file/media upload and sharing service with granular access controls

The system had to support access transitions like:

• private links
• restricted user access
• publicly accessible URLs

Main discussion points:

• requirements and rough capacity estimates
• blob storage for files/media
• metadata storage
• read-heavy access patterns
• replicas / cross-region scaling
• sharding and latency trade-offs
• API contracts
• object models
• access-token verification

LLD also came up inside the design discussion through API contracts, object models, and access control flow.

LPs discussed:

• Ownership
• Learn and Be Curious

Round 4 — Bar Raiser

This round was focused on LLD / logical maintainable code.

Prompt:

Design a Ride-Hailing / Cab Booking Service

Main requirements:

• match riders to nearest drivers
• track ride lifecycle
• handle fare calculations

Important parts of the discussion:

• concurrency: avoiding two riders getting matched to the same driver
• consistency under high concurrent load
• clean domain models: User, Driver, Ride, Location
• service layers: MatchService, RideService, PaymentService
• repositories
• State Pattern for ride lifecycle
• Strategy Pattern for payment / fare calculation

The interviewer had made it clear upfront that maintainability and production-grade object-oriented design mattered here, not just getting some code on the screen.

LPs discussed:

• Customer Obsession
• Bias for Action
• Delivering under tight constraints

Result

Offer.

After the loop debrief, there was a final HM alignment discussion around team placement, culture, engineering practices, and growth path.

https://preview.redd.it/or61iao2lxdh1.png?width=652&format=png&auto=webp&s=49ace5edec01e7fc9d85229d1a103c49131bb7d0

>Archived interview report, structured for this sub. Details preserved where available.

Quick context

Backend engineer with ~1.5 YOE. Recently laid off.

Previous base was ₹25 LPA. Expected ₹25L+ base and planned to negotiate later if selected.

Cleared DSA and LLD, reached HM, then got rejected.

Round 1 — DSA

Two medium-hard LeetCode-style questions.

Expected to write complete working code on a coding-pair platform, not a full IDE.

Q1 — Decode String type problem

Given an encoded string with nested brackets and repeat counts, decode it.

Example shape:

3[a2[c]] -> accaccacc

The tricky part is handling nested patterns, multi-digit repeat counts, and edge cases cleanly.

Spent around 30–35 minutes on this.

Walked through the given test cases and dry-ran the solution. Interviewer seemed a bit doubtful and mentioned it might fail on multiple cases, though it wasn’t tested extensively.

Q2 — Nodes at Distance K in Binary Tree

Given a binary tree, a target node, and an integer K, return all nodes that are exactly distance K from the target.

The usual approach is to treat the tree like an undirected graph:

• store parent pointers
• start BFS/DFS from the target
• move to left child, right child, and parent
• collect nodes at distance K

Implemented the standard 2-pass DFS solution in around 10 minutes.

Interviewer was satisfied.

Got the call for the next round the following day.

Round 2 — LLD

Prompt:

Design a Vehicle Rental System

Requirements:

• Multiple shop locations
• Bikes and scooters
• Inventory management
• Reservations
• Checkout and returns
• Rental start/end times

Design included:

• Vehicle base class
• Bike and Scooter inheritance
• Vehicle status enums
• Shop class maintaining inventory
• Ticket / Reservation entity
• Pricing Strategy pattern
• RentalSystem orchestration layer

Coding was not required.

The round was mainly about whether the design covered the requirements properly.

Finished the design with around 15 minutes left. Rest of the round went into alternate pricing strategies and design trade-offs.

This was the candidate’s first proper LLD interview and apparently went reasonably well.

Shortlisted for the next round.

Round 3 — Hiring Manager

Interviewed by an Associate Director with around 10 years of backend experience.

Discussion areas:

• Introduction
• Projects from previous company
• Architecture of one project using draw.io
• Timelines and why implementation took that long
• Ownership and impact
• Pros and cons of previous company
• Personal strengths
• On-call experience
• Types of production alerts
• Incident handling
• Examples of working late during critical production issues

This round seems to have been mostly about real work experience: ownership, delivery, production exposure, and whether the projects could be defended in detail.

Result

Rejected.

Rejection email came the next day.

Tried reaching out to HR for feedback, but no response.

Overall process was smooth. Interviewers were professional. LLD and HM rounds were discussion-oriented.

If anyone has recent Zepto SDE-1 compensation numbers, drop them in comments. Would be useful to know what range they’re actually offering now.

For people who have interviewed at Zepto / similar startups recently:

• What do they usually filter for in HM rounds?
• Is production/on-call experience heavily evaluated for SDE-1?
• How much depth do they expect when discussing past projects?

https://preview.redd.it/k1n4bmodhech1.png?width=377&format=png&auto=webp&s=f502f09e7094bd03a363c619bb72726cd6b16141

Quick summary

Promoted in March. Laid off in March. Then cracked Amazon SDE-2 in July.

Previous compensation

Component	Details
Previous org	Big Tech SaaS
Previous comp before promotion	~₹51 LPA
Comp after promotion	~₹68 LPA
RSU portion	~35% of comp
RSU note	Value down ~50%
Situation	Laid off in March restructuring

Basic details

Field	Details
Company	Amazon
Role	SDE-2
Result	Accepted
Timeline	July 2026
College	Tier 2 CSE
Previous org	Big Tech SaaS
Process	Referral → OA → Final loop → Offer

Timeline

Stage	Details
OA received	After referrals
OA result	Cleared after ~2 weeks
Interview scheduling	Delayed a few times because of interviewer availability / positions getting filled
Final loop	4 rounds
Offer	Received ~1 week after final round

Online Assessment

The OA had 3 sections:

• 1 DSA question
• Agentic coding
• Behavioral section

OA result came after around 2 weeks.

Final interview loop

Round	Type	LP focus mentioned
Round 1	DSA	Dive Deep, Invent and Simplify
Round 2	LLD	Ownership, Customer Obsession
Round 3	HLD	Earn Trust, Deliver Results
Round 4	Bar Raiser	Insist on the Highest Standards

Every round had Leadership Principle discussion.

Round 1 — DSA

2 questions.

Q1: Easy maps / sets question.

Q2: Medium infinite array question.
Solved using prefix array + binary search.

Around 20 minutes of LP discussion after coding.

Round 2 — LLD

Prompt:

Design and implement Meeting Room Scheduler

Around 30 minutes of LLD.

Then around 35 minutes of LP discussion.

Round 1 and Round 2 happened on the same day.

Round 3 — HLD

Prompt:

Design a device backup scheduler and restore system

Requirements:

• Backup device settings
• Backup files
• Backup media
• Restore data on new devices

Around 30 minutes of system design + 30 minutes of LP discussion.

Round 4 — Bar Raiser

2 DSA questions in around 40 minutes.

Q1: Find the next palindromic time for a given time in HH:MM format.
Marked medium.

Q2: Variation of kth smallest sum in a row-wise sorted m x n matrix.
Pick exactly one element from each row.
Marked hard.

Then around 20 minutes of LP discussion.

Result

Offer received around 1 week after the final loop.

Accepted.

Basic details

Company: Agoda
Role: Staff Software Engineer
Location: Bangkok
YOE: 8
Education: B.E, Tier 3
Current company: Product-based, non-FAANG
Result: Selected

Round 1 — Coding

Two questions.

Q1: Monotonic stack / nearest smaller element.

Q2: Given an array of priorities, return the rank of every element. Higher number = higher rank.

Round 2 — Platform Design + Code Review

Setup: data supplied to multiple airline aggregators.

Issues discussed:

• No rate limiting
• Incorrect API methods
• Lack of horizontal scaling
• No DB replication

This discussion went on for around 40 minutes.

Other topics:

• Software testing
• Rolling out to limited traffic

Last 10–15 minutes: code review.

Example improvement discussed:

• Use strategy/factory pattern instead of long if-else chains

Round 3 — System Design

Prompt:

Build a flight aggregation system

Topics covered:

• Clarifications
• Functional requirements
• Non-functional requirements
• Core entities
• API design
• DB choice
• High-level design
• Deep dives

Round 4 — Culture Fit

Topics:

• Technical leadership
• Handling conflicts
• Pushing back on design decisions

Result

Selected. took multiple rejections before finally cracking this one.

Compensation details

Current base: ₹52L

Agoda offer:

• Title: Staff Software Engineer
• Location: Bangkok
• Base: 225k THB/month
• Joining bonus: 450k THB
• Yearly bonus: 19% of base, performance based
• Stocks: No stocks for Staff level
• Tax: 15% for expats

Other benefits:

• Visa support
• Relocation support
• One-time WFH allowance

Notes

Process may vary by team, level, and timing.

Basic details

Company: Agoda
Role: Staff Software Engineer
Location: Bangkok
YOE: 8
Education: B.E, Tier 3
Current company: Product-based, non-FAANG
Result: Selected

Round 1 — Coding

Two questions.

Q1: Monotonic stack / nearest smaller element.

Q2: Given an array of priorities, return the rank of every element. Higher number = higher rank.

Round 2 — Platform Design + Code Review

Setup: data supplied to multiple airline aggregators.

Issues discussed:

• No rate limiting
• Incorrect API methods
• Lack of horizontal scaling
• No DB replication

This discussion went on for around 40 minutes.

Other topics:

• Software testing
• Rolling out to limited traffic

Last 10–15 minutes: code review.

Example improvement discussed:

• Use strategy/factory pattern instead of long if-else chains

Round 3 — System Design

Prompt:

Build a flight aggregation system

Topics covered:

• Clarifications
• Functional requirements
• Non-functional requirements
• Core entities
• API design
• DB choice
• High-level design
• Deep dives

Round 4 — Culture Fit

Topics:

• Technical leadership
• Handling conflicts
• Pushing back on design decisions

Result

Selected. took multiple rejections before finally cracking this one.

Compensation details

Current base: ₹52L

Agoda offer:

• Title: Staff Software Engineer
• Location: Bangkok
• Base: 225k THB/month
• Joining bonus: 450k THB
• Yearly bonus: 19% of base, performance based
• Stocks: No stocks for Staff level
• Tax: 15% for expats

Other benefits:

• Visa support
• Relocation support
• One-time WFH allowance

Notes

Process may vary by team, level, and timing.

Basic details

Company: Agoda
Role: Staff Software Engineer
Location: Bangkok
YOE: 8
Education: B.E, Tier 3
Current company: Product-based, non-FAANG
Result: Selected

Round 1 — Coding

Two questions.

Q1: Monotonic stack / nearest smaller element.

Q2: Given an array of priorities, return the rank of every element. Higher number = higher rank.

Round 2 — Platform Design + Code Review

Setup: data supplied to multiple airline aggregators.

Issues discussed:

• No rate limiting
• Incorrect API methods
• Lack of horizontal scaling
• No DB replication

This discussion went on for around 40 minutes.

Other topics:

• Software testing
• Rolling out to limited traffic

Last 10–15 minutes: code review.

Example improvement discussed:

• Use strategy/factory pattern instead of long if-else chains

Round 3 — System Design

Prompt:

Build a flight aggregation system

Topics covered:

• Clarifications
• Functional requirements
• Non-functional requirements
• Core entities
• API design
• DB choice
• High-level design
• Deep dives

Round 4 — Culture Fit

Topics:

• Technical leadership
• Handling conflicts
• Pushing back on design decisions

Result

Selected. took multiple rejections before finally cracking this one.

Compensation details

Current base: ₹52L

Agoda offer:

• Title: Staff Software Engineer
• Location: Bangkok
• Base: 225k THB/month
• Joining bonus: 450k THB
• Yearly bonus: 19% of base, performance based
• Stocks: No stocks for Staff level
• Tax: 15% for expats

Other benefits:

• Visa support
• Relocation support
• One-time WFH allowance

Notes

Process may vary by team, level, and timing.

Basic details

Field	Details
Company	Salesforce
Role	MTS
Location	Bangalore
Experience	3 years
Current role	SDE-2 at product-based MNC
Education	M.Tech CSE, Old IIT
Result	Selected + accepted offer

Round timeline

Round	Date	Notes
Online Assessment	15 May 2026	HackerRank, 75 min, 2 medium DSA questions
Virtual Screening	27 May 2026	1 hour, eliminatory DSA round
Onsite Round 1	6 June 2026	DSA
Onsite Round 2	6 June 2026	DSA
Hiring Manager	6 June 2026	Behavioral + project discussion
Positive feedback	9 June 2026	HR shared positive feedback
Offer process	~3 weeks	Delayed due to competing offer + compensation discussion

Process

This was part of a Salesforce pool hiring drive for multiple levels: MTS / SMTS / PMTS / LMTS.

For this MTS loop, there was no separate LLD or HLD round. The process was mostly DSA-heavy, followed by a Hiring Manager discussion.

Rounds:

• Online Assessment
• Virtual Screening
• Two DSA onsite rounds
• Hiring Manager round

Online Assessment — HackerRank

Date: 15 May 2026
Duration: 75 minutes
Questions: 2 DSA questions, both medium

No exact questions were shared for this round.

Virtual Screening Round

Date: 27 May 2026
Duration: 1 hour
Type: Eliminatory DSA round

Q1 — Good Ways to Split an Array

Given an array of non-negative integers, split it into three non-empty contiguous subarrays:

• A1
• A2
• A3

Let:

• S1 = sum of A1
• S2 = sum of A2
• S3 = sum of A3

Count valid splits where:

S2 <= S1 + S3

Return answer modulo:

10^9 + 7

This was partially implemented. The discussion/approach seemed to be enough.

Q2 — ATM Queue

There are n people in a queue.

Each person wants to withdraw some amount. The ATM allows max K units per transaction.

If a person still has money left after a transaction, they go to the back of the queue. Otherwise, they leave.

Return the order in which people exit the queue.

This one was solved completely.

After clearing this, HR scheduled all onsite rounds on the same day.

Onsite Round 1 — DSA

Date: 6 June 2026
Duration: 1 hour

Q1

Medium-hard problem around counting permutations of a string.

Took around 40 minutes to explain and implement.

Q2

Given an array, minimize its sum by performing this operation at most K times:

• Pick any element
• Divide it by 2
• Put it back into the array

Solved using a max heap.

This was done pretty quickly, around 10 minutes.

Onsite Round 2 — DSA

Date: 6 June 2026
Duration: 1 hour

Q1 — Design a data structure

Support these operations in O(1):

• insert(value)
• delete(value)
• getRandom()

getRandom() should return every element with equal probability.

Solved using HashMap + Doubly Linked List.

Q2 — Coin Change II

LeetCode problem:
https://leetcode.com/problems/coin-change-ii/description/

Onsite Round 3 — Hiring Manager

Date: 6 June 2026
Duration: 30–40 minutes
Coding: No

Topics:

• Standard behavioral questions
• Current project
• Work experience
• Problems solved at work
• Approach taken
• Reasoning behind design decisions

Mostly discussion-based.

Result

Selected.

Positive feedback came on 9 June.

Offer process took around 3 weeks because there was already a competing offer and compensation discussion.

Eventually accepted the offer.

Compensation note

slightly above the current standard compensation for the Salesforce MTS role, primarily because I had a competing offer.

Basic details

Company: Agoda
Role: Staff Software Engineer
Location: Bangkok
YOE: 8
Education: B.E, Tier 3
Current company: Product-based, non-FAANG
Result: Selected

Round 1 — Coding

Two questions.

Q1: Monotonic stack / nearest smaller element.

Q2: Given an array of priorities, return the rank of every element. Higher number = higher rank.

Round 2 — Platform Design + Code Review

Setup: data supplied to multiple airline aggregators.

Issues discussed:

• No rate limiting
• Incorrect API methods
• Lack of horizontal scaling
• No DB replication

This discussion went on for around 40 minutes.

Other topics:

• Software testing
• Rolling out to limited traffic

Last 10–15 minutes: code review.

Example improvement discussed:

• Use strategy/factory pattern instead of long if-else chains

Round 3 — System Design

Prompt:

Build a flight aggregation system

Topics covered:

• Clarifications
• Functional requirements
• Non-functional requirements
• Core entities
• API design
• DB choice
• High-level design
• Deep dives

Round 4 — Culture Fit

Topics:

• Technical leadership
• Handling conflicts
• Pushing back on design decisions

Result

Selected. took multiple rejections before finally cracking this one.

Compensation details

Current base: ₹52L

Agoda offer:

• Title: Staff Software Engineer
• Location: Bangkok
• Base: 225k THB/month
• Joining bonus: 450k THB
• Yearly bonus: 19% of base, performance based
• Stocks: No stocks for Staff level
• Tax: 15% for expats

Other benefits:

• Visa support
• Relocation support
• One-time WFH allowance

Notes

Process may vary by team, level, and timing.

[Curated] Salesforce SMTS Hyderabad — Jan 2025 Offer

Source: LeetCode Discuss
Note: This is paraphrased from a public LeetCode interview experience + compensation post. Not my personal interview experience.

Basic details

Company: Salesforce
Role: SMTS
Location: Hyderabad
YOE: 5.5
Offer date: Jan 2025
Org: HPS / Hyperforce Platform Security
Result: Offer

Background

Current comp before offer:

Base: 41L
Bonus: 8L
RSUs: 35L/year
Total: ~84 LPA

Oct: Got referral
Nov 5: HackerRank OA
Nov 20: Invited to Salesforce hiring drive
Nov 29: Coding rounds + system design + HM round
Dec 4: Fitment round with LMTS
Dec 13: Told another candidate was selected
Dec 30: Recruiter reached out again for another opening in the same team
Jan: Offer rolled out

Round 1 — HackerRank OA

Two coding questions.

The poster did not remember the exact questions, but mentioned both were medium-hard difficulty and all test cases passed.

After the OA, recruiter called the same day to discuss work experience, current TC and expected TC.

Round 2 — Coding

Platform: HackerRank
Format: 2 questions, run against available test cases.

Question 1

There is a stream of numbers and 3 types of queries:

(1, X) -> add X to the list
(2, X) -> add X to all existing numbers
(3)    -> print the current minimum and remove it

Example:

(1, 3)   -> [3]
(1, 5)   -> [3, 5]
(2, 10)  -> [13, 15]
(1, 12)  -> [12, 13, 15]
(3)      -> print 12 and remove it

Question 2

Coin change variation.

The poster solved both questions and passed all test cases.

Round 3 — Coding

Given a large number as a string, length up to 10^5.

Find the count of subsequences divisible by 4.

Return answer modulo:

10^9 + 7

The poster was initially stuck. The interviewer gave a hint around the divisibility rule for 4. After that, they came up with the solution, coded it, debugged a few bugs with the interviewer, and got it working.

Round 4 — System Design

Two discussions:

1. Celebrity problem on Twitter / social media
2. Incremental / blue-green rollout strategy for mobile app features

The poster had already read about the celebrity problem, so they were able to discuss feasible approaches.

For the rollout/deployment discussion, their current work experience helped because they had used similar rollout strategies at work.

Round 5 — Hiring Manager

Standard behavioral round.

Discussed the team and their work.

Fitment round

Later there was a separate discussion with an LMTS / lead from the team.

Topics:

Past work
Areas of interest
Reason for looking for a change

Offer story

After the interviews, the recruiter later said 2–3 candidates had cleared, but Salesforce went ahead with another candidate.

They offered a different opening, but the poster declined because the role/JD did not excite them.

Later, on Dec 30, the recruiter came back saying there was another opening in the same team and they wanted to extend an offer.

Offer details

Base: 57L
Bonus: up to 15% of base, around 8.5L
Stock: $145k over 4 years
Stock per year: ~30L
Total comp: ~95.5 LPA

The poster mentioned Salesforce usually may not offer this much RSU and that negotiation helped because they had unvested stocks at their current company.

Main takeaway from the original post

The process can be unpredictable. Even after clearing interviews, the offer may depend on openings, team fit, timing and internal decisions.

This community is for software engineers from India to share and read real interview experiences for tech roles in India and abroad.

The goal is simple:

>

For now, this community is focused mainly on engineering roles where coding is central. We may expand later, but we want to keep the scope focused in the beginning.

What a good post should include

Try to include as much of this as you’re comfortable sharing:

• Company
• Role
• Location
• Years of experience
• College / background, if relevant
• How you applied
• Online assessment details
• Number of rounds
• Type of questions asked
• System design / behavioral rounds, if any
• Timeline
• Result
• Compensation, if comfortable sharing
• What you would do differently
• Advice for future candidates

You do not need to reveal anything personally identifying.

Why post?

Because every detailed interview experience helps someone else prepare better.

If you recently got an offer, got rejected, cleared an OA, interviewed at a startup, or went through a full big tech loop, your experience is useful.

Basic rules

• Be respectful.
• Do not dox yourself or others.
• Do not share confidential company material.
• Do not post exact questions if doing so violates an NDA or company policy.
• No spam, coaching funnels, or low-effort self-promotion.
• Social links may be allowed if the post itself is genuinely useful.

Over time, we hope this becomes a useful archive of interview processes, preparation strategies, compensation insights, and real candidate experiences for Indian software engineers.

If you’ve interviewed recently, consider making the first few posts and helping seed the community.

Welcome to r/TechInterviewsIndia 🚀

After a long and challenging process, I finally received the offer for the Amazon SDE-1 role through AUTA. Since I found many experiences here helpful during my preparation, I wanted to share my complete interview journey.

Timeline

• Applied through referral on 8th March
• Received OA link on 23rd March
• Completed OA on 29th March
• Received interview call on 20th April
• Onsite interviews in Bangalore on 23rd April
• HM/Gen-AI round on 12th May
• Bar Raiser round on 16th June
• Received selection call on 24th June

Online Assessment

The OA was a standard Amazon assessment consisting of:

• 2 DSA questions
  • One Easy-Medium
  • One Hard
• Leadership Principles assessment
• Work style assessment

Round 1 (1 hour) – DSA

Conducted by an SDE-1 and SDE-2.

• 2 DSA questions:
  • One Greedy-based
  • One Binary Tree-based
• Both were standard LeetCode medium-level questions.
• Discussed approach, edge cases, dry runs, and time/space complexity.
• Since some time was left, the SDE-2 asked a puzzle question which I was fortunately able to solve.
• The round ended with a brief discussion about my resume and projects.

Round 2 (1 hour 15 minutes) – LLD

Conducted by another SDE-1 and SDE-2 panel on the same day after a few hours.

I was expecting DSA but got an LLD question based on designing a logger system.

Topics discussed:

• SOLID principles
• Design patterns
• Edge cases
• Different design approaches

I wrote pseudocode and kept discussing trade-offs and improvements throughout the interview. It definitely wasn't a perfect round, but continuous discussion and reasoning seemed to help. The round again ended with a few questions about my projects and experience.

After some time, I was informed that I had cleared both onsite rounds and that the remaining rounds would be virtual.

Round 3 (40 minutes) – Hiring Manager / Gen-AI

After a long gap, this round was scheduled for 12th May.

• One LeetCode Hard sliding window question.
• Discussed the approach, wrote the code, and performed a dry run.
• The interviewer seemed satisfied and then moved to 2–3 general AI-related questions.

Overall, this round went well according to me.

Round 4 (40 minutes) – Bar Raiser

After another long wait, my Bar Raiser round was scheduled on 16th June.

This was a purely behavioral round:

• Deep discussion around projects and resume
• Leadership and decision-making related questions
• Multiple follow-up questions on situations I described

The interviewer seemed satisfied with my answers, but honestly I was not very sure how the round had gone.

Final Result

After 8 days, on 24th June, I received a call from the recruiter informing me that I had been selected for the role.

The entire process was definitely lengthy and challenging. There were multiple long waiting periods between rounds, and at several points I was unsure about the outcome. In the end, things worked out, and I received the offer letter.

I am a 2025 passout with around 10 months of experience.

Happy to answer any questions regarding preparation, interview rounds, or the AUTA process.

This was during campus placements-dec'24 (freshers take notes).
CTC : 84 LPA (including esops)

Disclaimer : No DSA was asked

To get an interview call, we had to build a VAD (Voice Activity Detector) from scratch in 2.5 hours on-site (with proctorship), although we were allowed any tool we could use except any external api's (I do remember u/ChatGPTapp giving me hallucinated responses that I had to go back to docs.)

Dataset was provided (~50 audio files).

We were judged on :

1. Accuracy of speech detection
2. Code quality
3. Possible improvements to the approach that we couldn't implement.

Also any kind of architecture was welcome for building VAD, I went with Denoiser + WebRTC (GMM based) approach as I knew it would give the highest accuracy and they had the highest weightage for the same.

7 got shortlisted and I was one among them.
The interview was led by the head of ASR team.

We started with my internship experience at Tokyo where I led the ASR, VAD and open source LLM's integration for a company which were into warehouse management robots, and pivoting into adding speech functionalities into the robots.
We discussed :
> how I patched the WER using NLP to correct/ fill in the gaps if voice breaks in between.
> what VAD architecture I used
> how did I reduce CPU/GPU load

How I used different u/OpenAI whisper models to get p95 latency <800ms.
and high level scaling methodologies I used to benchmark and stress test STT models.

Then we moved onto Ml and transformer's basics (because I was more into LLM's) :

&gt; explain whisper-jax architecture and how it processes audio chunks
&gt; coding naive gradient descent from scratch on docs (as u/GoogleColab was auto completing for me lmao)
&gt; explain perplexity and what other benchmarks do we use for LLM's
&gt; touched self attention, differences between encoder - decoder architecture and that day i realized that almost all the new SOTA models are decoder only
&gt; He also went into a deep discussion as how we can relate linear algebra with transformers (I took a LinAl course)

At last, we discussed u/SarvamAI Bulbul models, especially why they use latent space decomposition and how that helps separate speech content from speaker/style representations.

*PS: No tokens were harmed in writing this.
**PS: Please don't dm for guidance, I am not a mentor. But if you want to discuss any specific resource in AI or distributed systems hmu.

X post: https://x.com/ranaharshraj7/status/2065801122494001516?s=46&t=wCYnaDcXpAImKDhlo9yNeA

Finally received an offer after more than 6 months of constant applying and getting rejected…

College: Tier-2
Experience: 1.8 YOE (startup)
LeetCode: ~500 questions solved

Interview Process

Recruiter Reach-out:
Got contacted on LinkedIn, replied, and received the OA link the next day.

Online Assessment (OA):

• 1 medium-hard question (deque-based, don’t remember exact)
• 1 medium graph question (DSU-based)
• Followed by the standard 2-hour work simulation

Got invited for onsite interviews the following week.

Onsite Rounds

Round 1:

• 1 hard DSA question
• Needed a small hint to reach the optimal solution
• Dry-ran on paper; interviewer was satisfied
• Followed by some LP questions

Round 2:

• 2 DSA questions
  • One straightforward BFS
  • One optimization using a geometry property
• LP questions after solving both

Round 3 (Hiring Manager):

• DSA question (similar to “Reconstruct Itinerary” but not exactly the same)
• Came up with optimal DFS solution
• Asked to write full code (no pseudocode)
• Discussion on GenAI, my projects, and current AI-related work
• No LPs in this round

Was informed I cleared all 3 rounds → Round 4 scheduled.

Round 4 (Bar Raiser)

• Discussion on time complexities of tree algorithms
• Deep dive into LP answers
• Had to explain my work in detail
• Interviewer seemed satisfied

Result

10 days later → Got the offer 🎉

It was an excruciating journey. Came very close to quitting multiple times, especially after getting ghosted post-final rounds despite good interviews.

But now, it all feels worth it. Truly one of the most gratifying moments.