PhonePe interview process (2026)

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

PhonePe salary & ratings · All interview processes

Software Engineer Intern (SDE Intern)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: 1-2 days · Recommended prep: 8-12 weeks

  1. Round 0: Online Assessment (Coding)

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

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: All Nodes Distance K in Binary Tree (Burning Tree) — Given a binary tree and a target node, treat the tree as an undirected graph (each node connects to its parent and children). A fire starts at the target and spreads one edge per second. Return the minimum time to burn the whole tree, i.e. the maximum distance from the target to any node (equivalently, enumerate all nodes at each distance K via BFS).

  2. Round 1: Technical Interview 1 (DSA)

    Onsite · 45-60 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: House Robber III — Given the root of a binary tree where each node holds an amount of money, you cannot rob two directly-connected (parent-child) nodes on the same night. Return the maximum amount of money you can rob without alerting the police.

  3. Round 2: Technical Interview 2 (DSA, harder)

    Onsite · 45-60 minutes · difficulty 4/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Frequency of the Most Frequent Element — Given an integer array nums and an integer k, in one operation you may increment any element by 1. You can apply at most k operations total. Return the maximum possible frequency of any single value after the operations.

  4. Round 3: Hiring Manager / Techno-HR Round

    Behavioral · 45-70 minutes · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

SDE-1 (0-2 yrs / campus & early-career)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~1-3 weeks · Recommended prep: 8-12 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Online Assessment (OA) — DSA coding

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

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: Burning Tree (Minimum Time to Burn a Binary Tree from a Target Node) — Given a binary tree and a target node, a fire starts at the target and each second spreads to all adjacent nodes (parent and children). Return the total time (in seconds) required to burn the entire tree.

  2. Round 1: Machine Coding / Low-Level Design

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

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Machine Coding: Fitness Class Booking System (LLD) — Design and implement a fitness class booking backend. Support user registration/login with tier-based packages (Platinum -> 10 classes, Gold -> 5, Silver -> 3), admin scheduling and cancellation of classes, booking with per-class capacity checks, cancellation up to 30 minutes before start, and waitlist promotion when a booked user cancels. Code must be runnable, modular, and cleanly OO.

  3. Round 2: DSA / Problem Solving (live)

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Generate Parentheses (All Balanced Parenthesis Combinations) — Given n pairs of parentheses, generate all combinations of well-formed (balanced) parentheses. Print each valid combination on its own line.

  4. Round 3: Hiring Manager

    Behavioral · ~45-55 min · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

SDE-2 (~2-5 yrs)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~1-3 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-10 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Take-home Machine Coding / LLD

    Assessment · 90 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: Design a Flight Aggregator (multi-airline search & booking) — Design a flight aggregator that ingests inventory from multiple airline partners and lets users search and book flights. Handle very high-QPS search APIs, show connecting itineraries when no direct flight exists, manage cross-airline bookings and partner-API failures, and choose a data model with the right consistency (ACID vs eventual). Discuss scaling read replicas without unbounded replication lag.

  2. Round 1: Problem Solving / DSA (PSDS)

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Course Schedule (Detect Cycle / Topological Order of Prerequisites) — There are numCourses labeled 0..numCourses-1 with prerequisite pairs (a, b) meaning course b must be taken before course a. Determine whether it is possible to finish all courses (i.e., the prerequisite graph has no cycle). Interviewers push for a solution better than naive repeated BFS.

  3. Round 2: System Design (HLD)

    System_design · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a Q&A / Discussion Forum (Quora-like, later multi-tenant) — Design a Quora-like Q&A platform, initially for internal company use and later extensible to other organizations. Cover requirement gathering, high-level components/services and data flow, RDBMS schema with foreign keys vs NoSQL (Cassandra) trade-offs, efficient search/feed, API-gateway auth/authz, and per-microservice token passing.

  4. Round 3: Hiring Manager

    Behavioral · ~45-55 min · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

SDE-3 / Senior SDE (~6+ yrs)

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

  1. Round 0: Machine Coding / LLD

    Onsite · ~90 min · difficulty 4/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Design a Real-Time Order Feed System — Design an order feed for a food-ordering/commerce app where a user sees real-time updates to their order status (placed, accepted, prepared, out-for-delivery, delivered). Cover the push vs pull delivery of updates, fan-out and connection management (WebSocket/long-poll), event pipeline, ordering/idempotency of status events, and scaling to millions of concurrent live orders.

  2. Round 1: DSA / Problem Solving

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Alien Dictionary (Derive Character Order) — Given a list of words sorted lexicographically by the rules of an unknown alien language (using the first k lowercase letters), derive an ordering of the characters consistent with the sorting. Output any valid order, or an empty string if the ordering is inconsistent (cycle or a prefix appearing after its extension).

  3. Round 2: High-Level / System Design

    System_design · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a Distributed Compute / Job-Monitoring Cluster — Design a distributed compute cluster that runs jobs and provides real-time analytics and monitoring: job scheduling and status tracking, live log streaming, status dashboards, and health metrics for databases, file systems, and servers. Discuss the metrics/log pipeline, time-series storage, alerting, and horizontal scale.

  4. Round 3: Hiring Manager / Bar Raiser

    Behavioral · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

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