Flipkart's DSA rounds draw from trees, graphs, dynamic programming, and binary-search-on-answer patterns — interviewers expect a working brute-force solution first, then an optimized one once you've talked through the trade-off. The three problems below are real, recently reported (2025) Flipkart questions with full solutions.
You are given a special perfect binary tree where every node stores the minimum value found anywhere in its own subtree. Find the second-smallest distinct value present anywhere in the whole tree, in O(log n) time rather than a full O(n) traversal.
Input: root = [2,2,5,null,null,5,7]
Output: 5
The root stores the subtree minimum (2). The second-smallest distinct value anywhere in the tree is 5.
You are given a list of dishes, each with a list of other dishes it depends on being prepared first (an ingredient/prep dependency chain). Determine whether it is possible to prepare all dishes in some valid order, i.e. detect whether the dependency graph is free of cycles.
Input: dishes = ['gravy','curry','rice'], deps = {'curry': ['gravy'], 'rice': []}
Output: true
gravy -> curry has no cycle, rice has no dependency — a valid prep order exists (gravy, rice, curry).
A Koko-Eating-Bananas style problem: given piles of items and a fixed number of time units available, find the minimum constant rate at which you can consume from the piles (at most one pile per time unit, at that rate) so that everything is finished within the allowed time.
Input: piles = [3,6,7,11], hours = 8
Output: 4
At a rate of 4 per hour, all piles finish within 8 hours; rate 3 would take 9 hours.
More DSA questions Flipkart has asked recently
These topics were reported in verified 2025 Flipkart loops. Full problem statements, solutions and explanations for these are part of the Placement-Ready PYQ Kit.
3 more verified DSA questions with full solutions in the full Placement-Ready PYQ Kit
Includes every round they were asked in, from the online assessment through onsite PS/DS rounds.