CRED interview process (2026)

Round-by-round breakdown of the CRED software engineering interview across 4 levels and 16 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.

CRED salary & ratings · All interview processes

Software Engineering Intern (Backend / Mobile) — Summer / 6-month

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 2-3 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-8 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months

  1. Round 0: DSA Coding Screen (HackerRank OA or CodeChef contest)

    Assessment · ~90 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank

    Sample question: LRU Cache — Design a data structure for a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache with a fixed capacity. Support get(key) returning the value (or -1 if absent) and put(key, value) inserting/updating; when capacity is exceeded, evict the least-recently-used entry. Both operations must run in O(1) average time. CRED often adds a thread-safety follow-up in the machine-coding variant.

  2. Round 1: Machine-Coding / Project Round

    Assessment · ~90 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank

    Sample question: Two Sum (Pair with a given sum K) — Given an array of integers and a target value K, return the indices of two elements that add up to K (assume at most one solution, no element reused). Solve in O(n) time using a hash map. Report -1 -1 if no pair exists.

  3. Round 2: Technical Interview (video) — DSA + Project Deep-Dive

    Onsite · ~60-75 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Shortest Path Between Two Files in a File System (BFS) — Given a file system modeled as an undirected graph of folders/files (edges connect a folder to its contained folders/files), find the length of the shortest path (number of hops) between a source node and a target node. Return -1 if unreachable. Solve with breadth-first search.

  4. Round 3: HR / Managerial — Culture & Motivation

    Behavioral · ~30-60 minutes · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

SDE-1 (Software Engineer, Bangalore)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-10 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Screening — Take-home assignment (lateral) or online coding test (freshers/campus)

    Assessment · 24-hour · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: LRU Cache — Design an LRU cache with O(1) get(key) and put(key,value). On capacity overflow, evict the least-recently-used entry; get returns -1 if the key is absent. CRED's canonical DSA warm-up that also recurs in the machine-coding round.

  2. Round 1: DSA & Puzzles round

    Phone · ~90 minutes · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Pair With Given Sum (Two Sum) — Given an array and a target K, find two elements that sum to K (return their 0-based indices, or -1 -1 if none). CRED's DSA round starts from fundamentals; the interviewer probes sorted/unsorted, duplicate and negative variants and expects the O(n) hash approach.

  3. Round 2: Machine Coding / Low-Level Design round

    Onsite · 5 hours · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Design an In-Memory Key-Value Store / Cache (LLD) — Machine-coding round: build a clean, extensible in-memory key-value store / cache supporting get/put/delete with pluggable eviction (LRU/LFU) via the Strategy pattern, TTL, and thread-safety considerations. CRED grades modularity, SOLID adherence, and testability over raw speed.

  4. Round 3: System Design + Managerial (with Head of Engineering)

    System_design · ~90 minutes · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design Snake and Ladder Game (LLD) — Machine-coding round: model a Snake and Ladder game with clean OOP - Board, Dice, Player, Snake/Ladder entities, turn engine - emphasizing extensibility (variable board size, multiple dice, configurable snakes/ladders) and SOLID principles.

SDE-2 (Software Engineer II, Bangalore)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 8-12 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Machine Coding / LLD round (payment-processing feature)

    Onsite · 5 hours · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Design a File Storage / Sync Service like Dropbox (HLD) — System-design round: design a Dropbox-like file storage and sync service - blob storage for file chunks, metadata DB, chunking/dedup, presigned upload URLs, sync/conflict handling, and scaling. The CRED interviewer actively mutates constraints mid-discussion to test how you adapt the design.

  2. Round 1: DSA round (onsite)

    Onsite · ~60-90 minutes · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Sliding Window Maximum — Given an array and window size k, output the maximum of every contiguous window of size k in O(n) using a monotonic deque. Matches CRED SDE-2's reported practical DSA problems on sliding window, maps, sets and heaps.

  3. Round 2: System Design / HLD round

    System_design · ~60-90 minutes · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a Wide-Column Store like Cassandra / HBase — Design (and in the machine-coding variant, partially implement) a column-oriented distributed key-value store like Cassandra/HBase: data model, partitioning/consistent hashing, replication and consistency, LSM-tree storage, and bonus secondary indexes.

  4. Round 3: Hiring Manager / Managerial round

    Behavioral · ~60-90 minutes · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

SDE-3 / Senior SDE (Bangalore)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~3-5 weeks · Recommended prep: 8-12 weeks · Cooldown: ~12 months

  1. Round 0: Machine Coding / LLD round

    Onsite · 5 hours · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Design a Splunk-like Log / Metrics Manager — System-design round: design a Splunk-style log management system that ingests high-volume logs and serves queries with filters over arbitrary time ranges - ingestion pipeline (queue/stream), time-partitioned storage (time-series/document store + inverted index), query engine, retention, and scaling.

  2. Round 1: DSA & Problem-solving round

    Onsite · ~60-90 minutes · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Trapping Rain Water — Given non-negative bar heights, compute total trapped rainwater in O(n) time / O(1) space using the two-pointer running-max technique. Represents the hard end of CRED's reported array/DP DSA problems at the senior bar.

  3. Round 2: System Design / HLD (deep)

    System_design · ~90 minutes · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design LinkedIn 'Suggest Connections' (People You May Know) — System-design round: design a people-you-may-know / connection-suggestion service over a large social graph - graph storage, friend-of-friend traversal at scale, candidate generation and ranking, precompute vs. online tradeoffs, caching, and freshness.

  4. Round 3: Hiring Manager / Leadership round (Head of Engineering)

    Behavioral · ~90 minutes · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Other companies' interview processes

Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.