Manaswi Hiremath

My PhonePe Interview Experience

PhonePe was the first company to visit our campus on 1st August, and it turned out to be one of the most memorable experiences of my journey so far.

Round 1: Online Assessment

Format: 4 DSA Questions

Topics included: Arrays, Strings, Graphs, Dynamic Programming

Honestly, I did not expect to clear this round, but results were declared around 10:30 PM, and out of 300+ candidates, 30 students were shortlisted.

Round 2: Technical Interview (DSA Round)-next day

The interviewer explained the process before starting. I would be given 2 DSA questions, to be solved in 45 min – 1 hour. First, the approach, then write the code on paper.

Q1 Minimum Time to Reach N-th Floor

Given: Array a: time to go from floor i to i+1 using stairs Array b: time to go from floor i to i+1 using lift A constant c: time taken for the lift to arrive when called (not taken for consecutive floors)

Goal: Find the minimum time to reach the N-th floor.

I first explained a greedy approach, but one of the interviewer’s test cases failed. So I switched to a DP-based solution, which worked for all cases. The interviewer was satisfied and asked me to code it.

Q2 Maze with Cat, Dogs, and Blocked Paths

A cat starts at a position in a grid, some blocks are blocked, and some positions have dogs. Goal: Find the shortest path to the end point such that the chosen path stays maximally far from all dogs.

I used a graph approach: BFS + Dijkstra. The interviewer asked how to optimize BFS since every node would need revisiting. I couldn’t answer that part. He then explained Multi-source BFS, asked me to write pseudo-code, and also asked about Dijkstra again.

Feedback

He said:“Your problem-solving skills are very good. You just didn’t know multi-source BFS, and that’s fine.”

This round gave me a huge confidence boost.

Round 3: Resume-Based HM Interview

10 candidates were in this 1st slot, and 2 of us progressed to this round.

The HM interviewer:

Started with self-introduction Asked about my internship in detail Went deep into my projects, tech stack, and implementation Asked about my hackathons and its projects and extracurriculars (leadership/management part)

Then he asked: Explain UPI Payment Gateways

I explained the high-level design, and we discussed how PhonePe handles fraud prevention. It was a friendly and technical discussion.

OOP Concepts Since I am from ENTC, he told me to work on core subjects. He showed me two code snippets (polymorphism & inheritance) and asked for outputs. I answered both, though I fumbled a bit on the explanation of the second one.

Round 4 (Final Round): Competitive Programming Round

10–12 candidates were selected, and I was the only girl.

Q1 — PacMan and the Stars Given a string with:

• (stars) . (empty spaces) P (Pacman)

Pacman can move 1 step per second in either direction and must eat all stars. We had to compute the minimum time required. Example: *..PP….*P

I tried multiple approaches, but all of them failed on edge cases. I got nervous and couldn’t think clearly.I was all tensed at this point and instead of thinking of the solution i was thinking what must the interviewer be thinking(dont do this mistake,just focus on Questions)

The interviewer suggested me to move to the next question.

Q2 — Minimum Weight Subgraph You are given a directed weighted graph and nodes: S1 S2 Destination

Find the minimum-weight subgraph such that both S1 → Destination and S2 → Destination paths exist.

I first suggested Floyd–Warshall, and explained it. He asked me to optimize as Floyd-Warshall has high time complexity, so with hints, I moved to:

Dijkstra’s Algorithm Then BFS optimization for some cases

He accepted the final approach.

Then he gave me a choice:

Continue pseudo-code or Go back to Q1

I chose Q1, but I couldn’t solve it in time. I was too nervous by then, and even the final Q/A didn’t go well.

Final Thoughts

Though I wasn’t selected, PhonePe changed my confidence completely.

Months of consistent DSA practice finally had a real test, and I came out feeling proud and satisfied.

✨ Tips

Consistency is everything.

Striver’s A2Z DSA Sheet helped me a lot.

A bit of CP practice would have helped in the final round.

Don’t listen to people who say it’s all luck — PhonePe was purely DSA-based. No luck, no referrals.

Keep doing DSA — it will help you in the long run.