My FrontEnd Interview Experience At Razorpay

Hey Folks! I hope you are doing great.

As you know from the announcements that I've recently joined Razorpay as a FrontEnd Engineer.

So this is a writeup about my interview experience at razorpay and how I
cleared the interview and got the offer!

After over 1k LinkedIn likes & 600 twitter hearts, and 50+ DMs about
"what is the interview process at razorpay?" I'm finally writing this.

Let's get started. First thing first I've got a lot of questions in one week and the most frequent one is:

"How did you get this opportunity?"

Simple one liner answer to this question would be
"I built my personal brand, showcased my skills publicly and connected with friends in the community who work at razorpay"

My story of getting the opportunity is bit interesting, so there was a twitter post from the Razorpay engineering handle and I posted a meme as a reply to that post,

Then Kamlesh DM'd asking if I was ready to explore the opportunity, even though that tweet was totally a joke from my side and I had no plans to join razorpay atm 😂, I still took the opportunity and moved forward with the interviews. (And boi I'm glad I did)

https://twitter.com/anuraghazru/status/1413166291821600770

And there goes my sweet 🥰 twitter friends creating "HIRE ANURAG CAMPAIGNS".

Thank you Sid, Vish, Saurabh it was very wholesome :)

Now the interesting story out of the way, let's talk about the interview experience.
So there was a lot of queries about the interview process at razorpay from folks.

So the first thing which I really liked about the interview process is that you will immediately be given a "Interview Preparation Guide - FE Engineer" document which will have everything you need to know about the whole process,
I cannot say enough how useful that document was.

It had information about the Razorpay's Philosophy, the interview rounds and what to expect from the each round and evaluation criteria for each round, also few handy interview tips.

First I had a catch-up call with Kamlesh it wasn't part of the interview but just to give me a general idea of what I'm going into we decided to have a call and Kamlesh discussed with me about the structure and the business model and what they are doing at Razorpay, It was a great insight and after that I decided to move forward with the real interviews.

First I got a call from the recruiter about the schedule and you will get daily reminders before each interview from the recruiter.
And after clearing every round you will get call from the recruiter for the next one.

He scheduled the first interview.

Let's start with the rounds then. In total there was 4 interview rounds:

1. Round 1 (1 Hour) Technical Deep Dive
2. Round 2 (1.5 Hour) Coding Round
3. Round 3 (1 Hour) Web Fundamentals
4. Round 4 (1 Hour) Hiring Manager Round

Round 1 (1 Hour) Technical Deep Dive

This round heavily focuses on discussions about your own projects (any project) and your work experience.

I was asked about my work experience at timelessco and what projects I worked on, we talked a lot about the design system & component library I was building at timeless.

It was like a discussion about the project on how it works, what challenges I faced building it, what things I liked about the projects.

We also talked about my open source projects, we talked about github-readme-stats and BugVilla.

Interviwer asked me "What are the challenges you faced building BugVilla"

I answered, and discussed about how I had to rewrite the whole redux state management code to add optimistic updates and to fix the laggy behaviour because of wrongly structured state of the application.

it was a pretty chilling experience and discussion.

Tips to clear this round:

• Study your past projects to get a refresher on your memory before going into this round
• Brag a lot about your projects
• Don't hesitate to say you wrote a bad piece of code
• Justify your answers/approach to solving the problem clearly

Round 2 (1.5 Hour) Coding Round

This round is a typical coding round it will be on codesandbox.io and you can choose any framework/language to solve the given problem.

Unlike other companies where you will be given to revert a binary tree, at razorpay you will only get real-world problems to solve. Which is :chefkiss:

For me this round was more like "pair-programming" than "coding-test",

Interviewer will not just sit around watch you type code, interviewer will also give you hints, tips and discuss the problem with you.

My question statement was a medium difficulty task, it was carefully created to test your understanding of basic to advanced concepts in FrontEnd development.

Although it was pretty straightforward (spoiler, but I messed it up) I started explaining what I will do and took some time to plan my approach.

After that I started implementing one of the core part of the logic where I kinda mess things up, I decided to go with a typical old school approach to the problem but not to mention It did not worked very well, it was kinda broken and I could not deliver the whole thing, but I wasn't too afraid or nervous because it was a fun learning experience for me.

After finishing the half-baked demo my interviewer asked "Anurag, how else can you solve this problem?"

Just after hearing that question my mind blowed and I got the idea which I totally missed.

I proposed my solution but since we did not had time I could not implement it.

Now you might say "Woooww Anurag you totally messed this up!"

Yes I did, but the cool thing about this interview is that they aren't looking for solid solutions from you, they just want to test out your thought process and approach to solving the problem by thinking it in logical way.

Even though I could not deliver the solution I was able to come up with the solution and approached the problem in a logical manner.

Tips to clear this round:

• Think out loud, convey all your thought process to the interviewer so that they know you are solving it in a logical way.
• Ask questions about the problem statement.
• Plan before you write the code, don't jump into it directly.
• If you are stuck discuss with the interviewer about the problem and explain it to him.
• If you could not deliver the solution at least think of few different approaches to the problem and propose that to interviewer.

Round 3 (1 Hour) Web Fundamentals

This is also a discussion based round where you will be asked various open-ended questions like "How to build X feature", "How X works in Y"

I just loved this session!! It was like two engineers discussing on how something works. You won't believe how much I learned from this one interview, it was very insightful and learned a lot.

I got asked about 4 or 5 questions all of which were interconnected to one another.

First question was pretty straight forward and I had experience with it so I explained it pretty well.

Then the second question was bit more tricky, there was a few more interconnected questions about web fundamentals and how the web works.

It was a such a information packed session that I felt knowledgeable after leaving that interview session. 🤯

Tips to clear this round:

• Just discuss your thoughts clearly.
• You are also the interviewer, so ask questions.
• Focus and study fundamentals of how web works.
• break down problems into smaller chunks and explain them

Round 4 (1 Hour) Hiring Manager Round

This round was also a discussion based one, but it was more like a culture fitment round, there was lots of small questions about my own work experience in my previous firm, the teams, how we worked and my day to day work at timeless.

This round mostly focuses on my:

• Ability to resolve conflicts in the team
• Decision making ability
• Which time management method I like most (I like macro management)

There were specific questions like

• "If a team member proposed a solution which you don't agree with (vice versa) in that case what will you do"

There were also behavioural questions

• "What motivates you most and what is the one feature which you built you are not proud of?"

Interviewer will also explain to you about how the work happens and various things about razorpay.
This is the best chance to clear up any org specific questions if you have.

Tips to clear this round:

• Be honest and be "you" because you have to work with a team seamlessly in day-to-day life.
• Be rational about your thought process and answer the questions correctly.
• if you don't have the experience to answer the question, just say "I don't have the experience but If i was in that situation I will do...this that and that..".
• Ask lot of questions.

And that's it folks! Thanks for reading all the way through.

My interview experience at razorpay was super smooth and I felt like I could give another 5 rounds without any issue. It was relaxing and a fun learning experience.

In Conclusion

You will not be the only person learning from the interview, It is a both side interview.

If interviewer asks you 10 questions, you should also ask 10 questions. Do reverse interview!

• Ask questions.
• Think out loud.
• Plan your approach.
• Make sure you have projects to showcase and brag about.
• Don't be nervous, take the interviews as a fun learning experience :).

I hope this writeup will help you pass your next interview at Razorpay (hope to see you soon in the team)

I would like to thank you the wonderful onboarding and interview team at razorpay and especially Kamlesh, he guided me through the whole process and even gave me personal guidance on career.

Finally also like to thank you timeless.co for being so nice and respecting my decision.

Thanks! Bye!