Real, anonymized candidate journeys from recent (2025–2026) Walmart SDE-2 and SDE-3 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 — DSA
Binary tree level-order traversal, evaluated as much on complexity reasoning as on getting the code right.
Round 2 — DSA
A graph DFS connectivity problem, plus a verbal-only follow-up variant with no new code expected.
Round 3 — LLD
Restaurant reservation/serving system design with a Spring Boot implementation discussion, plus a multithreading exercise: print numbers in sequence using three threads.
Round 4 — HLD
Design a video-streaming platform (Netflix/Hotstar-like), covering requirements, storage, CDN, and scaling trade-offs.
Key takeaway: Interviewers weighted the 'why' behind an approach as heavily as the working code — being able to defend design decisions and reason through follow-ups verbally mattered a lot. The whole process completed within about a week.
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 — DSA
A group-anagrams style problem and a longest-unique-substring string problem.
🔒 2 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit
Round 1 — DSA
A sliding-window string problem: longest substring with at most k vowels.
🔒 2 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit