Real, anonymized candidate journeys from recent (2025) Swiggy SDE 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 — Online Assessment
3 LeetCode-medium problems: a sliding-window question, a graph shortest-path problem, and an array nth-root computation.
Round 2 — Technical (DSA + Java/Spring)
Counting the number of structurally distinct binary search trees for 1..n (brute force, then DP), followed by JDK vs JRE vs JVM, garbage collection, @EnableAutoConfiguration, and dependency injection.
Round 3 — LLD
Design a shopping cart supporting adding items, payment, and discounts, using the Strategy pattern for discount logic after clarifying requirements up front.
Round 4 — Hiring Manager
A deep dive into past projects, SQL/database questions, a self-assessment of skills, behavioral questions on motivation, and an unbounded-knapsack DP problem.
Key takeaway: Clarify requirements and constraints before designing anything, state your assumptions out loud, and prepare for project deep-dives and behavioral questions to show up in the same round as a coding problem — they aren't always kept separate.
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 — HackerEarth Online Assessment (3 hrs)
Build a small CRUD app with a separate React frontend and Node backend. Frontend passed every test case; backend failed one.
🔒 3 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit
Round 1 — Online Assessment
2 medium problems built around arrays, hashmaps, and the sliding-window technique.
🔒 3 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit
Round 1 — DSA Buffet
Number of Islands on a grid, a subset-sum counting problem extended to negative numbers with memoization, and a Trie implementation with search and prefix-search.
🔒 2 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit