Kotak Mahindra Bank SDE-1 Interview Experience

I recently interviewed for the SDE-1 role at Kotak Mahindra Bank through a friend's referral. The process consisted of 3 technical rounds.

Round 1: Bar Raiser (1.5 Hours)

DSA: 2 easy-level questions. I had to write and run the solutions on an online IDE.
LLD: Movie Ticket Booking System, covering classes, APIs, database schema, design patterns, etc.
System Design: Questions on distributed systems, horizontal vs. vertical scaling, SQL, and related concepts.

Round 2: Technical Round (1.5 Hours)

DSA: 2 medium-level questions — one based on DP and the other on strings.
Resume Discussion: An in-depth discussion about my projects and the reasoning behind my technical decisions and trade-offs.

I was able to write optimal, running solutions for both coding questions, but I faced some difficulty with the resume-based questions.

Kotak Mahindra•SDE 1

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104 views• Oct 11, 2026Pending

Round 3: Technical Round (1.3 Hours)

LLD: ATM System Design.
I designed the classes, entities, methods, and their responsibilities.
I was asked to justify my design choices and explain how the system would behave in different scenarios.
Towards the end, I was asked to code a small part of the design.

Final Outcome

I received positive feedback in all three rounds, but unfortunately, the position was put on hold.

However, after 2–3 months, HR contacted me again and offered me the job! 🎉

My takeaway: Don't focus only on DSA. Prepare your resume thoroughly, understand the trade-offs in your projects, and practice LLD with proper reasoning behind every design decision.