Kotak Mahindra Interview Experience For SDE-2 - (Frontend) 2023

Location – Bengaluru, India

Years of Experience – 2 years of Experience

I Applied through LinkedIn, and after 1-2 weeks I got an email regarding my interview process, the interview process was taken in 2 phases, one with bar raiser and the other with the company's senior developer.

Total Rounds - 4 (2 - Bar Raiser, 1 - Kotak's interview panel)

Technical Round 1 - Bar Raiser (1 Hour)

He explained the interview process and after the introduction, he started by asking a DSA question:

Coding Question: Length of the longest substring without repeating characters.

After this question, he went on to ask about some React.js concepts.

1. What is virtual DOM?
2. What is a diffing algorithm?
3. What is the difference between class-based and function-based components of react?
4. Concept of selectors in react redux.
5. How do you improve the performance and help with data retrieval in large-scale applications?

Technical Round 2 - Bar Raiser (1 Hour)

It was a low-level design round. After the introduction, the interviewer gave me a problem statement. She explained the problem statement and said that she did not need the complete code; I only needed to provide pseudocode.

Problem Statement:

There is a JIRA-like app that consists of buckets, and each bucket contains a list of tasks. Each bucket has a unique ID, and each task has an ID and a user email. Additional data can be added if needed.

Since it was a frontend interview, I only had to provide the solution with respect to the client side.

1. Suggest the correct datatype to store the data and perform different operations.
2. Search a task using user email.
3. Sort the tasks based on 'created at' date.
4. Delete any task.

After I provided the pseudocode for all the questions, she asked me to give the Component design for the same, and then she started with some basic web app related questions:

1. What is CDN?
2. What is http2 protocol?
3. How we keep track of version of an application - (Version Control) ?
4. What is CI/CD and how we implement ?
5. How we optismise a web app.

Both interviewers were very kind and helpful; they assisted me whenever I was stuck or heading in the wrong direction. After the interview, both gave me positive feedback.
After a week I got a call from the Kotak's HR, that I was selected for the third round of interview. It was an onsite interview.

Technical Round - 3

A senior developer from Kotak took my interview, after introductions and explaining the interview process, he started with the question.

Coding Question: Write a function to flatten an array, the function takes an array and depth as arguments.

Input: arr=[ 1, 2, [ 3, 4, 5, [ 6, 7 ] ], 8, 9 ] depth =1

Output: arr=[ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, [ 6, 7 ], 8, 9 ]

Machine Coding Question:

Design a progress bar with two buttons , Start and Stop. When 'Start' button is clicked the progress should start from 0 and it should keep increasing till 100. Whenever 'Stop' is pressed it should stop an upon clicking 'Start' button, the progress should start increasing from same value where it stopped.

I had to provide the solution in react.js with proper UI. After these questions , he asked me one last question:

Tell me about a feature you have worked on and found most challenging. How did you implement that feature, and what challenges did you face during its implementation?

Feedback: I believe my interview went quite well and was expecting to be shortlisted for the next round. But to my great surprise when I contacted HR the next day, it was a rejection.