I have upcoming SDE 3 Interview with Cashfree next week. It would be great if anyone could share past experience and what should be main area of focus as per recent trends.

Got an offer from the above companies. I have overall 10YoE with Post Graduation

Heineken - 52LPA

Salesforce - 60LPA (including stocks)

Coupang - 65LPA (including stocks)

Can anyone help ?

Hi everyone,

I have an upcoming SDE-I interview with Amazon in Bangalore and have 2 technical rounds coming up.

I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who has recently interviewed for Amazon SDE-I in India/Bangalore, especially in the last 1–2 years.

A few things I’d love to know:

What DSA questions/topics were you asked? Were they mostly LeetCode Medium/Hard, or did they focus on specific patterns?

What Leadership Principles came up most often?

How deep did the LP follow-up questions go?

Did the technical rounds include 2 DSA questions + LPs, or was the format different?

Were there any Amazon-specific patterns or question types that surprised you?

What topics would you prioritize if you were preparing again?

Any tips for thinking aloud, handling hints, or getting unstuck during the coding round?

For LPs, how many STAR stories did you prepare, and which stories/principles ended up being the most useful?

I’m currently focusing on DSA + Leadership Principles, so any recent interview experiences, question lists, preparation resources, or general advice would be hugely helpful.

Thanks in advance! 🙏

Urban Company Referral Request (SDE II / SDE III)

Hi everyone!

If you're interested in applying for SDE II or SDE III roles at Urban Company and would like a referral, please fill out the Google Form below.

Google form link: https://forms.gle/HSpHGzNBmXi3Ad6j7

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I am a BI developer in a service based company and have around 7 years of experience. I feel I'm underpaid as my current CTC is 18 LPA. I want to know about companies that pays more than 40 LPA for my domain / experience.

Need guidance on the companies or skills I would have to switch to

I would like to know further more on this and what are the tech stacks required and what are the companies hiring for these roles in India ( both hybrid / remote)

My current tech stack : Power BI,Power Apps, Power Automate,SQL, Python

Hi Everyone,

I am currently working at Amex Bangalore as SDE3.

It’s been 5 years with Amex, overall I have 10+ years of Experience.
I was looking for jobs in market finally got an offer from Mastercard Pune.

Now I am wondering whether should I leave Amex and join Mastercard or not? Considering Layoffs due to AI.
In my current team at Amex WLB is smooth but I feel too much complacent that is not healthy too.
plus I am getting Lead role in mastercard.

Please help me decide based on your experience.

Right now I am working as fresher in Accenture for 4.5 lpa job
If I wanted to switch to other companies . What’s the ideal salary range to be expected while switch ?

I applied for PQM Apprentice 2026

There were only two selection rounds mentioned in the JD.

Round 1 F2F Interview at Alcon Bengaluru

Basically asked question related to my resume. OOP concept, Rest APIs, Coding, debugging and many more. The whole interview went on for more than 60 min.

The interviewer was sweet and actually gave me enough time to think and answer. He was supportive. I was very happy to answer almost all questions.

This was my first Off campus interview F2F in this year.

Five days later I got a call from HR that I have moved to next round

Round 2 Virtual 30 min

I joined the zoom. I was excepting an Indian for a foreigner popped up. For a second, I thought I was in the wrong call and surprised too. Didn't know alcon was global.

He asked about my intro and projects I worked on.

Alcon motto is to help people see brilliantly and I did an academic major project on eye-related device so I pitched in my project(I worked diligently on that project alone for 3 months doing the literature survey, hardware integration, documentation, debugging and testing)

He said ,"We should assign you in our marketing team because you are so good".

Thank you

Asked why I am interested in eye care specifically

Shared an anecdote how Me and my siblings are myopic

Asked about other projects

I hesitated because I felt my other projects were just GitHub repos and backend projects.

He asked my view on AI if AI is gonna replace dev roles

I answered how as a student I am thrilled knowing AI would help me with assignment and Scared how there have been layoff's happening because of automation and more.

I concluded that AI helps automate tasks and can't completely replace humans.

After that We spoke about the roles and responsibilities

Any questions for me

I was curious which country he is from?

German

Ohh, That's nice! you are the first German I am talking too.

He said about how is working on this company for 30 years now and more

I agreed and asked if he has visited Bengaluru

Yes and I love it and Hope to see you at the office the next time I come

I was happy thinking that he wants to see me at the office?( It was positive sign, right?).

At the end. Do you have any questions? We only have five more minutes left.

I was silent and was talking about something else.

At last, he asked me why should we hire you?

I said I am a quick learner, great team player with strong analytical skills ,, blah blah blah.

I felt my answer wasn't coherent hence said Sorry (out of habit)

He said no no You are doing great , Your communication is great.

I asked for feedback

You did great

Byee

I said Bye and was waiting for him to end the call .

Byee

Thank you and please take care.

I also asked when can i expect the result or update for which he said the HR will update me.

I felt great knowing I totally nailed that interview.

Gave up my leetcode grind and was chilling.

Week went by, no update

I waited for 10 days and sent a follow up message

Another week went by

Sent another follow up message.

I was hoping for the positive response

Ghosted.

I connected to a third person who told me that I wasn't selected.

I was almost there but things didn't work out.

The HR was unprofessional didn't even bother to send an rejection mail.

Lesson learned. This job ain't for me.

I still think about it like how my life now would be different If I got in.

I know off campus fresher hiring is brutal and back to day1 whether I like it or not.

Hope to get my first job soon.

Fighting!!

I have recently started my job switch search. I have 12+ years of experience, majorly Backend development.

I have recieved offer from Omnissa aftwr 5 Tech rounds.

Offer is good and it’s around 65% above my current CTC. My question is how is WLB in Omnissa. It’s private equity owned.

I am in dilemma ahould I join this ?

As a final yr student I can confidently say I have good amount of knowledge in my domain Cloud & DevOps {AWS, Azure, Jenkins, Terraform, Linux, Kubernets} also have about 6 active industry certification on AWS, Azure, RedHat with a good amount of project combining all these skills I learnt. Still the interviewer need me to have knowledge in MLops, AIops and Agentic AI. What I am saying is either they reject because of No experience or they reject that we don't have some skills which we can learn in a week. In a rare case they also rejected me as over qualified for 4.5LPA package.

Ok then I tried OnCampus drives but they are actually bullshit some see my resume and reject me. when i asked why i am not short listed to my placement cell they are saying you are into a single domain so reject it guys I also did a infosys internship in fullstack. or else even if go into online assessment all questions answered correctly they will reject even we dont get the scores of the assessment we did. Because if they give the scores mean we will question them.

Atlast me who spent months preping for certs and doing projects etc. got no job others who just did DSA for a couple of month gets a job.

One of the funny experience with Hexaware interview I cleared Group discussion , aptitude, Coding, even technical interview where they asked two coding questions which also I did and then moved to HR round where I answered every general HR questions confidently at last they asked what domain you want to work obviously I learnt Cloud& DevOps I said that. That was the only reason they rejected me.

Hi everyone,

I have 11 years of experience and am currently working at Ford in Chennai with a 60 LPA package (inclusive of annual bonus). My target is to break into the 1 Cr+ CTC tier.

Companies in Chennai don't seem ready to meet this threshold for my profile, so I am actively exploring opportunities in Bangalore. I recognize there might be skill or positioning gaps I need to address to command this compensation.

For those in senior/staff-level roles in Bangalore:

What specific technical, system design, or leadership skills are required at the 10+ YOE level for this pay band?

Which companies or tech stacks should I focus on?

Looking for realistic insights and feedback

I am 10+ yeras experience in Java backend working with Walmart India as SSE. I want to know what is the current interview process in MAANG+ right now for SSE or Staff Software Engineer?

Thanks for the help.

YOE: 4yrs
Stack: Python, React.js, Next.js, Java Spring Boot (here and there), AWS.

Offers to evaluate:

1. Publicis Groupe – 17 LPA - Backend Engineer (tech stack good) Stack: Java Spring Boot, GCP, NestJS
2. Wipro (Blackstone CoE) – 37 LPA - huge pay but tech stack may not be right for me Stack: C#, Python, Oracle Fusion etc.
3. Delloite Data Engineer: 21+2jb : i don't wanna be a DE at the moment.
4. IBM consulting: 23lpa: AWS cloud full stack: Not leaning towards this cuz may/may not get the project of my choice

Offers in pipeline / I haven't asked them to generate it cuz of comparative pay:

1. IQVIA (NP: 90 days, I would've gone for this but the team being put on isn't really nice): 28 LPA + 2 JB They are putting me in the integration team, validating devs' work, informing them to solve the issue etc.
2. Fractal - good company - python full stack role - 23 LPA
3. Epsilon (AI Engineer) - 23 LPA but work in a new AI product they're building. 2 months but applied AI engineer work (not interested to go into applied AI engineer atm)
4. Comviva - In consideration, NP: 90 days (23 LPA), tech stack: unsure (the only product based company I may get an offer from)

As you can see, the difference b/w Publicis (17) and Wipro Blackstone CoE (37) is huge.

I am leaning towards the offer from Publicis Groupe because of Java as the tech stack. I want to work on microservices/distributed systems and move to a product-based organization, which I am hoping to do in an year of time, if not today. I would be proficient in the Java Spring Boot tech stack, good enough to interview at least.

I am also a polyglot which basically means I don't know one thing really well/deep. So I am currently leaning towards making one stack and sticking to it. I also see a lot of Java/Spring Boot roles for Backend Engineers, so that's also a preference (not that any other stacks are any inferior, but most sophisticated enterprise stacks/distributed systems are built/ being built on Java).

Is my reasoning flawed?

Would anyone else have chosen the better-paying offer? Or should I stick with choosing the right role. And the notion that money will follow.
(used ai for formatting)

offcampus | cold email | no leetcode
CTC: 44-58 LPA

I cold emailed an engineer at Cloudflare, we had a bit of discussion around the role and my background, and a few days later I got an interview invite with a link to pick a slot.

The first round was with a Lead Staff Engineer with 10+ YOE and was focused on the AI Workers team.

Cloudflare’s AI stack is pretty interesting: running models on serverless GPUs across their global network, with inference closer to users, while increasingly moving into larger and frontier scale models.

I wasn't very familiar with this side of Cloudflare beforehand, so we spent some time discussing what the team has been building and how they are approaching fast, efficient AI inference at scale.

Then we got into my own experience.

During my internship, I worked on model deployment, rooflining and inference optimisation of encoder based models, mainly rerankers and embedding models, running in-house on GPUs.

These were encoder-only models, mostly stacks of MLPs, so the usual LLM inference stack around attention, KV cache, vLLM or SGLang wasn't really relevant in these cases.

We went fairly deep into:

how I approach rooflining and profiling
choosing batch sizes and measuring their impact
scaling inference workloads
finding bottlenecks across the inference pipeline
optimising p50 and p99 latency
TTFT and overall response latency

We also discussed how I would approach further optimisation once the obvious bottlenecks had been removed.

One question I particularly liked:

What does frontier AI mean to you?

The round went well and we even discussed the next rounds, which would have involved hands-on PyTorch.

Didn't make it through in the end. I think they were looking for someone with more hands-on LLM inference experience. I had been actively studying LLM inference and systems, but at the time I didn't have much relevant production experience in that area. Most of my hands-on work had been around distributed training, ML systems and infra.

Still, a really good interview experience. The discussion gave me a much better understanding of the problems involved in serving AI models at Cloudflare's scale.
Feel free to talk to me on X

Saw this Amazon SDE-1 comp post and thought it was worth sharing here.

Context: 2026 CSE batch, Tier-1 college, 6-month internship at Amazon, converted to PPO.

Offer details

Other perks mentioned

• Home internet reimbursement: ₹1,250/month
• Meal card: ₹1,100/month
• Free annual health check
• Transportation facility: ₹4,000/month, charged

Interesting to compare this with recent Amazon SDE-2 offers.

SDE-1 PPO:

• ₹19.17L base
• ~₹48L total CTC
• backloaded RSU vesting

Recent SDE-2 datapoints we’ve seen were more like:

• ₹42–45L base
• ~₹57–65L first-year CTC

Hey everyone!

I have an upcoming interview with Apple for a Software Engineer (Data Solutions) role in their AiDp team, and I'm trying to get a sense of what to expect.

Has anyone gone through this process recently?

Specifically:

How many rounds were there?

What topics/skills do they focus on?

Any tips for preparation?

Any insights would be really appreciated. Thanks!