Lessons
Lesson 1 · 12 min · 
Assessment guide The four rounds called 'design'
- Machine coding: 90 minutes in your own IDE, everything in memory, a driver program, then a review call where they add a requirement. Flipkart, PhonePe, Razorpay, Swiggy.
- LLD discussion: 45 to 60 minutes of entities, a class diagram and method signatures, sometimes one feature coded. Swiggy, Uber, Amazon, Meesho.
- Code design: Atlassian's version. A small spec in parts (snake game, rate limiter, court booking), working code, and each part adds a rule to see if your design bends or breaks.
- HLD: boxes, arrows, APIs, schema and scale. Core for SDE-2. Freshers usually get a light version: schema plus endpoints, or a pagination API.
- The invite can be wrong about which one you'll get. An Uber SDE-1 candidate prepared LLD and was asked to design a messaging app with a DB schema. Ask in the first two minutes: classes and code, or services and storage?
machine codingLLDcode designHLD
Lesson 2 · 10 min · Assessment guide What your level gets asked
- Some fresher drives skip design entirely: two reports from Flipkart's 2023 and 2024 off-campus drives describe OA, DSA and HM with no machine coding. OOP theory still comes up in tech and HM rounds.
- Early-career loops at product companies usually have an LLD or machine coding round. Swiggy ASDE (follow and unfollow with DB and endpoints), Swiggy Instamart SDE-1 (cron, snakes and ladders), Razorpay SDE-1 and PDE-1 (photo sharing, parking, EMI calculator), PhonePe 0 to 3 YOE (issue resolution), Amazon SDE-1 (a trie problem graded on code structure).
- SDE-2: machine coding plus review, an LLD round, an HLD round, an HM round. PhonePe reviews push on thread safety, and Uber asks for multi-threaded code outright.
- 2025 and 2026 added AI-allowed rounds at Razorpay, Atlassian and Microsoft. Flipkart's 2026 statement banned AI. Prepare to work both ways.
- Use this to plan: campus prep covers modules 1 and 2, SDE-1 prep goes through module 7 (with 6 and 8 recommended), SDE-2 does everything.
ASDESDE-1SDE-2review round
Problems
No problems here: this module is reading only.