Real, anonymized candidate journeys from recent (2025) Razorpay engineering loops in India — round by round, including what was asked, how the candidate approached it, and the outcome.
One complete journey, start to finish
Round 1 — System Design (45 minutes)
Design a job scheduler service end to end.
Round 2 — Machine Coding
Design and implement a load balancer, not just whiteboard it.
Round 3 — System Design
Design a Google Docs-like collaborative document system, including access-control-list handling.
Round 4 — HR
Discussion of resume, background, and compensation expectations.
Key takeaway: With about six years of experience, the candidate moved from application to offer in roughly two and a half weeks, crediting having concrete, ready-to-discuss designs for common systems (schedulers, load balancers, ACL-guarded documents) rather than improvising from scratch in the room.
More real interview journeys
The first round of each journey below is shown in full; the rest of each candidate's journey — every remaining round, verbatim — is part of the Placement-Ready PYQ Kit.
Round 1 — LLD (~1 hour)
Build a configurable logger that supports multiple severity labels and routes each log entry to a different destination (console, file, or web endpoint) based on configuration.
🔒 2 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit
Round 1 — Machine Coding (90 minutes)
Build an in-memory search engine for a blog-style platform supporting document insertion, deletion, pattern search, and result ordering; the interviewer probed inverted-index and prefix/suffix-tree approaches.
🔒 1 more round — continue this journey in the full kit