Dream11 / Dream Sports interview process (2026)
Round-by-round breakdown of the Dream11 / Dream Sports software engineering interview across 3 levels and 16 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.
Dream11 / Dream Sports salary & ratings · All interview processes
SDE-1 (Software Development Engineer I), Mumbai
Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-10 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months
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Round 0: Recruiter / HR screen
Phone · 20-30 min · elimination round
Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview
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Round 1: Online DSA coding round
Assessment · ~60 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment
Sample question: Asteroid Collision — Given an array asteroids of nonzero integers (absolute value = size, sign = direction: positive moves right, negative moves left), simulate all collisions. When two asteroids moving toward each other meet, the smaller explodes; if equal, both explode. Asteroids moving the same direction never meet. Return the state of the asteroids that survive.
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Round 2: Machine coding / project + LLD round
Onsite · 40-60 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Design the Dream11 fantasy-sports leaderboard — Design a leaderboard for a fantasy-sports platform like Dream11: millions of users across contests need near-real-time rank updates as live match scores change. Cover score ingestion, the ranking data structure (e.g. Redis sorted sets / partitioned leaderboards), read vs write scaling, top-K and 'my rank' queries, and consistency during rapid score bursts.
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Round 3: Hiring Manager round
Behavioral · 30-45 min · difficulty 2/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
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Round 4: HR / culture-fit round
Behavioral · 20-30 min · difficulty 1/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
SDE-2 (Software Development Engineer II), Mumbai
Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 3-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 8-12 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months
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Round 0: Recruiter / HR screen
Phone · 20-30 min · elimination round
Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview
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Round 1: Online DSA coding round
Assessment · ~60 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment
Sample question: Minimum Path Sum — Given an m x n grid of non-negative numbers, find a path from the top-left to the bottom-right cell that minimizes the sum of the numbers along the path. You may move only down or right at each step. Return that minimum sum.
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Round 2: Resume / project + Database & LLD deep-dive (virtual)
System_design · 45-60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Live system design interview
Sample question: Design a real-time lineup-notification system — Design the system that pushes 'lineup announced' notifications to Dream11 users 30 minutes before a match starts. Inputs are two Kafka streams (user->contest joins, and match lineup events). It must scale elastically from ~1,000 to millions of users, fan out only to relevant users, and deliver on time. Discuss ingestion, join/materialization (Redis + Spark), scheduling, fan-out, dedup, and delivery guarantees.
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Round 3: High-Level System Design (onsite, Mumbai)
System_design · 60-90+ min (sometimes with two SDE-3s) · difficulty 3/5
Mode of interview: Live system design interview
Sample question: Design a real-time monitoring & alerting system (Prometheus/Grafana-like) — Design an in-house metrics monitoring and alerting platform comparable to CloudWatch or Prometheus + Grafana: high-volume metric ingestion, time-series storage, windowed aggregation, dashboards, and alert evaluation. Define scope and FRs/NFRs, estimate scale and storage, choose a time-series datastore, and handle ingestion back-pressure and failure.
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Round 4: Hiring Manager round (AVP / EM, onsite)
Behavioral · 45-60 min · difficulty 3/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
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Round 5: HR / Values round
Behavioral · 20-30 min · difficulty 1/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
SDE-3 (Software Development Engineer III), Mumbai
Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: 3-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 8-12 weeks · Cooldown: No published policy (LOW).
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Round 0: Recruiter / HR screen
Phone · 20-30 min · elimination round
Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview
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Round 1: Data Structures & Algorithms
Assessment · ~45 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment
Sample question: Minimum Number of Increments on Subarrays to Form a Target Array — You start with an array 'initial' of all zeros with the same length as 'target'. In one operation you pick any subarray and increment every element in it by 1. Return the minimum number of operations required to turn 'initial' into 'target'. (Optimal answer is target[0] plus the sum of positive consecutive differences; O(n).)
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Round 2: System Design & Architecture (onsite)
System_design · 60-90+ min (Senior SWE / EM, sometimes two SDE-3s per SDE-2 · difficulty 4/5
Mode of interview: Live system design interview
Sample question: Design the Dream11 digital wallet — Design Dream11's digital wallet: users add money, join paid contests (debit), receive winnings (credit) and withdraw. Requirements: strong consistency and no double-spend on concurrent contest joins, an auditable immutable ledger, idempotent and exactly-once debit/credit, reconciliation with payment gateways, and handling of holds/refunds. Discuss data model, isolation/locking (optimistic vs pessimistic), 2-phase commit vs saga, and sharding.
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Round 3: Hiring Manager discussion
Behavioral · ~45 min · difficulty 3/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
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Round 4: Behavioral / Cultural fit (HR)
Behavioral · ~30 min · difficulty 1/5
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.