Flipkart
Indian e-commerce giant tackling massive supply chain and scale problems.
4 Rounds
~18 Days
Hard
The Interview Loop
Recruiter Screen (30 min)
Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.
Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)
Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.
Interview Question Bank
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
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medium
Tell me about a time you handled a critical production outage. What was your immediate response, and what was the long-term fix?
#Incident Management
#Ownership
#Problem Solving
Software Engineer
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Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a situation where you strongly disagreed with a senior engineer or your manager regarding a technical decision. How did you resolve it?
#Conflict Resolution
#Communication
#Data-Driven Decision Making
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to deliver a project under a very tight deadline. Did you compromise on quality? How did you manage the scope?
#Time Management
#Prioritization
#Agile
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Give an example of a time you mentored a junior engineer who was struggling with their performance or technical skills.
#Mentorship
#Empathy
#Team Building
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you designed or built a feature that completely failed in production or had to be rolled back. What did you learn?
#Failure Analysis
#Continuous Improvement
#Humility
Software Engineer
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Coding
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hard
Design an in-memory Pub/Sub Message Queue system similar to Kafka. It should support multiple topics, publisher/subscriber registration, and concurrent message consumption.
#Object-Oriented Design
#Concurrency
#Data Structures
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Design a Snake and Ladder game. The board should have configurable sizes, multiple players, and customizable placements for snakes and ladders.
#Object-Oriented Design
#Extensibility
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Design a simplified version of Flipkart's SuperCoin reward system. Users earn coins on purchases and can redeem them. Rules for earning/redeeming change dynamically based on user tiers (Plus, Non-Plus).
#Design Patterns
#Business Logic Abstraction
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Design a Parking Lot system. It should support multiple floors, different vehicle types (2-wheeler, 4-wheeler), and dynamic pricing strategies based on time and vehicle type.
#Low-Level Design
#Algorithms
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Design a Task Planner / Project Management tool like Jira. Users should be able to create tasks, assign them, change statuses, and search tasks by tags or assignees.
#Data Modeling
#Search Optimization
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Implement an LRU (Least Recently Used) Cache. It should support get and put operations in O(1) time complexity.
#Hash Map
#Doubly Linked List
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Given a grid where each cell can have a 0 (empty), 1 (fresh orange), or 2 (rotten orange), find the minimum time required to rot all oranges. A rotten orange rots adjacent fresh ones every minute.
#Graph
#Breadth-First Search
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
hard
Given n non-negative integers representing an elevation map where the width of each bar is 1, compute how much water it can trap after raining.
#Two Pointers
#Dynamic Programming
#Array
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
hard
Given two strings s and t, return the minimum window in s which will contain all the characters in t. If there is no such window, return an empty string.
#Sliding Window
#Hash Table
#String
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
hard
Given two words (beginWord and endWord), and a dictionary's word list, find the length of shortest transformation sequence from beginWord to endWord.
#Graph
#Breadth-First Search
#String
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
hard
Merge k sorted linked lists and return it as one sorted list. Analyze and describe its complexity.
#Linked List
#Heap
#Divide and Conquer
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
There are a total of numCourses courses you have to take. Some courses have prerequisites. Determine if it is possible for you to finish all courses.
#Graph
#Topological Sort
#DFS
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Given an integer array nums, return the length of the longest strictly increasing subsequence.
#Dynamic Programming
#Binary Search
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
hard
Given two sorted arrays nums1 and nums2 of size m and n respectively, return the median of the two sorted arrays. The overall run time complexity should be O(log (m+n)).
#Binary Search
#Array
#Divide and Conquer
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
hard
Given a sorted dictionary of an alien language having N words and k starting alphabets of standard dictionary. Find the order of characters in the alien language.
#Graph
#Topological Sort
#String
Software Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design the backend architecture for Flipkart's Big Billion Days Flash Sale. The system must handle millions of concurrent requests for a highly discounted, limited-inventory product.
#High Availability
#Concurrency
#Caching
#Queueing
Software Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Design a Shopping Cart service for an e-commerce platform. It needs to be highly available, handle guest carts merging with logged-in user carts, and support fast reads/writes.
#Database Selection
#Data Merging
#Scalability
Software Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design an Order Management System (OMS) that tracks the lifecycle of an order from placement to delivery. It must handle payment failures, inventory reservations, and status updates.
#Microservices
#Saga Pattern
#Event-Driven Architecture
Software Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Design a scalable Notification System that can send SMS, Email, and Push notifications. It must handle rate limiting, prioritization, and third-party vendor failures.
#Asynchronous Processing
#Rate Limiting
#Resilience
Software Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design Ekart's Delivery Routing System. Given a set of delivery agents and a large number of packages, how would you assign packages and calculate the optimal route?
#Geospatial Data
#Optimization Algorithms
#System Architecture
Software Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Design a Product Search with Auto-complete functionality. The system must return relevant results in under 50ms and handle typos.
#Elasticsearch
#Trie Data Structure
#Caching
Software Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a Real-time Inventory Tracking System. How do you ensure that the inventory count is accurate across multiple fulfillment centers while handling high concurrent purchases?
#Distributed Systems
#Consistency
#Database Locking
Software Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a Clickstream Analytics System to track user behavior on the Flipkart app in real-time. The data will be used for personalized recommendations.
#Data Streaming
#Big Data
#Analytics
Software Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
How would you design the Payment Gateway Integration service? Ensure that a user is never double-charged, even in the event of network timeouts.
#Idempotency
#Distributed Systems
#API Design
Software Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Design a Review and Rating system for products. It should support upvoting reviews, calculating average ratings in real-time, and filtering out spam.
#Data Aggregation
#Caching
#Anti-abuse
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Write a Java program to print even and odd numbers sequentially using two threads.
#Java
#Multithreading
#Synchronization
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Write a SQL query to find the top 3 highest-selling products in each category.
#SQL
#Window Functions
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Explain how B+ Trees work in the context of database indexing. Why do relational databases prefer B+ Trees over standard Binary Search Trees?
#Database Internals
#Data Structures
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
What is a Cache Stampede (Thundering Herd) problem in Redis, and how would you mitigate it in a high-traffic e-commerce application?
#Redis
#System Design
#Concurrency
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
How does Kafka handle consumer group rebalancing? What are the challenges, and how can you achieve exactly-once processing semantics?
#Kafka
#Message Queues
#Data Consistency
Difficulty Radar
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Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
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