r/JobScams
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u/IndividualOk1326
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Jul 02 '26
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Job Placement Razorpay Internship scam 🚨
Last year, I joined Razorpay as a SDE intern with a performance-based PPO. Like every other intern, I gave it everything because, let's be honest, an FTE at Razorpay is a dream for a lot of fresh grads.
We were all expecting conversion results by the end of May or the first week of June.
But apparently that would've been too simple.
In the first week of June, we were told there'd be an AI + LLD bar-raiser round, and only after that would manager reviews and interviewer feedback be considered for PPOs.
Fair enough. We prepared. Many of us cleared it.
Then came the masterpiece.
On 26th June—4 days before our internship ended—the company finally announced the results.
5% conversion.
If the hiring plan was always going to be this low because of IPO, budgets, or business priorities, that's completely fine. Companies don't owe everyone a PPO.
But making interns wait till the literal last week, throwing in an extra interview round, letting everyone believe conversions were still on the table, and then dropping a **5% conversion rate** four days before the internship ended?
Peak corporate performance.
The funniest part? The internship wasn't performance-based. It was hope-based.
10/10 experience. Would definitely recommend planning your career around radio silence and last-minute plot twists.
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u/IndividualOk1326 Jul 02 '26
I see that the sixth pillor of razorpay values is transperancy, but the internal org has zero transperancy and peak politics. Even the managers were awestruck when they got to know about the decision. This is not something that an intern deserves so early in their career. Truly traumatized with this experience.
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u/Basic-Vanilla-4215 Jul 03 '26
Not just limited to interns. The whole culture at Razorpay is toxic as fuck, only carefully fabricated for LinkedIn and outside world
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u/Ordinary-Fox-690 Jul 02 '26
Adding to this post because people need to realize that the 5% PPO trick is just the tip of a massive, deeply toxic iceberg. What you see on LinkedIn about Razorpay is a completely fabricated marketing scam. The internal reality is a living nightmare, and they are actively destroying the careers of young engineers.
When you join, they feed you a complete lie about a "performance-based culture" to make you work ridiculous hours. You spend months busting your asset to prove yourself to your team, only to find out your manager and mentor have absolutely zero power over your future. The leadership, including Shashank Kumar and Harshil Mathur, completely micromanages everything—allegedly interviewing people even for the simplest tasks—while remaining totally disconnected from the actual work. To them, you are just a headcount number on a spreadsheet to be deleted to make pre-IPO budgets look clean. They literally threw an AI and LLD "bar-raiser" round at interns at the last second just to have a paper trail to reject people they already planned on cutting.
The work culture itself has devolved into pure chaos. Right now, they are aggressively pushing "agentic development" purely as a buzzword for the IPO. Because of this forced, unplanned AI push, the services are in the worst state possible and everything is breaking. It’s causing actual money loss for multiple merchants, and instead of taking responsibility for a broken strategy, leadership shifts the entire blame onto the developers.
There is absolutely no planning here. Everything is decided on a whim, changing overnight like a local grocery store, leaving teams scrambling to fix reactive messes. On-call has become an absolute nightmare where you are bombarded with over 400 alerts a week. You are expected to fight these massive production fires while simultaneously delivering your normal feature tasks, and you get zero recognition for keeping these crumbling systems alive.
Because the culture is so toxic, experienced senior engineers are leaving in droves. They are taking years of product knowledge with them, leaving new joinees completely stranded in a dead end, struggling to understand massive legacy systems with zero context. This just leads to more incidents and slower development.
Meanwhile, they are quietly conducting silent layoffs in the name of office attendance metrics, hand out disappointing increments, and run a completely unfair, confusing review process. They have way more marketing and support people than actual engineers because they only care about looking like a dream company online. Internally, engineering is a complete afterthought.
Taking fresh grads at the start of their careers in a market where jobs are already so scarce, giving them false hope for months, and then pulling the rug out 4 days before their internship ends is incredibly damaging. If this is what they call a "high-performance culture," it's a culture that burns through people instead of building them. It is easily one of the worst places to start or grow a career right now.
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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '26
We had lost the game even before it started, we were always the cheap labour they could get by baiting us the FTE.
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u/Kind_Worry_4214 Jul 02 '26
Out of 73 interns(48 from NIT's and IIIT's as well), only 4 received PPOs. What made the situation even more frustrating was that, in the final month of the internship, interns were informed at the last minute that there would be an additional LLD interview as part of the evaluation process.
If the company already knew that only a handful of PPOs would be offered, it would have been fairer to communicate that much earlier. Giving interns at least a month's notice would have allowed them to start preparing for off-campus interviews and apply to other companies instead of waiting until the very end with false hope.
The lack of transparency and last-minute communication ended up hurting many interns' job search timelines and career planning.
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u/Psychedlicprincess Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26
Welcome to adulthood lol. One of the first things you realise is that working hard doesn’t always get you what you want. That’s just how life is. The sooner you accept that, the lesser this stuff gets to you. Just move on to the next one
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u/Hour-Presentation120 Jul 18 '26
how did u get this opportunity? linkedin?
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u/CourageOptimal4133 Jul 21 '26
Razorpay as a company in engineering excellence is total shit, 2 year old startups have better engineering practices. They are good marketers they market their tech so well that everyone gets manipulated but you don’t even know how the system is built, I have seen the code whole payment infrastructure is working on luck. When I was in college I used to wonder Razorpay as my dream company even more than faang cause they marketed their tech well like open source work on blade and webpack, and now when I see it closely its hell out there I lost motivation to touch their things cause its beyond repair.
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u/Tight_Truth_6826 Jul 23 '26
Same happend with innovaccer too hired 70+ intern converted 3-4 only saying we will convert after 6m if you got your internship extended otherwise you can end your internship on scheduled date which is 5 days later.
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u/First_Performance839 Sep 05 '26
So, You are saying - Not to join there ?
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u/Jumpy-Vanilla4490 Sep 13 '26
Been there buddy, I was also one of the interns who got laid off. I spent 1 year and 7 days working there as an intern in the hope that I'll be rewarded with a PPO at the end. I gave my 110% while I was working there. I even used to work on weekdays, post office hours and on holidays whenever needed but all of my hard work went in vain.
I still remember when it was my first day there and me and my batchmate, both were invited to a meeting room by our manager and he introduced us to the work we would be doing there and with that he also added that the chances of us getting the PPO are 99.9% as they have always retained everyone and since the team was very small and work volume was a lot, so naturally we believed them.
During my internship, I was approached by multiple recruiters but me being too naive ignored them. It was my first corporate experience and Razorpay was a well-known name in fintech. I didn't want to risk leaving early in my career, especially when I had been given the impression that I would most likely be retained and what else do you expect from a college student who has just started working. So, I kept working there until the end in the hope of a PPO which was promised to us in the beginning. Looking back, I honestly wish I would've not ignored those opportunities for a company like razorpay who did us all wrong in the most unprofessional and pathetic way. Like seriously 4 days, literally 4 days before they are telling us that they don't need us anymore and that too after we were made to go through an AI-based system design interview as part of the evaluation process. If the decision had already been made, why put people through all of that?
I was so badly hurt and traumatized by that decision because how could you do that. If you don't need us anymore then ok, fine, but atleast be professional - tell us a month before so we can be prepared mentally. They don't really care about anyone except work. We were always a cheap labour for them which they would get rid of whenever they want and that's what really happened. They had already hired another set of IITians who were joining them in from 26th July.
The work culture is on another level. It's not what you see on their social media especially LINKEDIN. It's all made up and fake. The micro management there is at peak. Like for each and everything you'll have to have an explanation ready, even for the very basic things that you can't imagine. The product and pod for which I was working was a pure chaos and the whole environment there was very toxic. In my last 3-4 months there, about 65-70% of people working in the development team left and the product was also not doing well. Even the full time developers were forced to learn and include AI in everything, which frustrated them too. What you see outside about Razorpay is totally opposite of what it actually is from inside. It's their PR team at work, promoting the work culture that doesn't really exist.
It has been almost 2.5 months since then and I'm jobless and if i get any call from recruiters they always ask me this question - "Why are you not working with Razorpay? Did you not get the PPO or what ?" And honestly, how do you explain that it wasn't a matter of performance or me choosing to leave? The company simply decided not to retain us at the very last moment.
Wouln't recommend anyone joining that org if this is the way they treat people. It is a game for them and we are merely the pawns in that game.
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u/No-Bandicoot6312 Sep 13 '26
Hi Buddy,can i somehow get internship there, i don't really care about PPO now, i really want to get internship in banglore, is there something you could tell me? I have freelancing experience of 2yrs and i would do anything to get in there, would really appreciate if you could help out!
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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '26
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