Groww SDE-1 Interview: A Complete Breakdown
If you’re aiming for a product-engineering role in Indian fintech, Groww SDE-1 is one of the most exciting interviews you can prepare for. Real-time trading, massive user traffic, and a culture that asks engineers to own problems end-to-end—this is not just another CRUD job.
Over the last few years, CodeKerdos learners and mentors have gone through multiple Groww interview loops—backend, Android, web, and SDET. This blog distills those experiences into a practical guide you can directly prepare from.
1. Why Groww attracts product engineers
2. Typical Groww SDE-1 interview flow
3. Round 1 – Online Assessment (OA)
4. Round 2 – DSA / Problem-Solving Interview
5. Round 3 – Machine Coding / Low-Level Design
6. Round 4 – Hiring Manager & Culture Fit
7. What Groww really screens for
1. Why Groww attracts product engineers
Groww started in 2016 to make investing in India simple, transparent, and accessible. They describe themselves as a customer-first, technology-led, asset-light company, with a strong emphasis on simplicity and transparency in everything they build.
A few reasons our community loves interviewing there:
Massive scale: millions of investors using the app for mutual funds, stocks, options, and more.
High trust stakes: you’re dealing with people’s money—reliability and correctness really matter.
Ownership culture: Groww talks openly about a culture of ownership, customer obsession, and long-term thinking, and our mentors have felt that in interviews.
So the interview is designed to find builders with strong fundamentals who also think like product owners, not just coders.
2. Typical Groww SDE-1 interview flow
Across the different loops our learners and mentors have experienced, a standard pattern emerges:
Online Assessment (OA) – MCQs + 1–2 coding questions
Round 2: DSA / Problem-Solving Interview
Round 3: Machine Coding / Low-Level Design
Round 4: Hiring Manager + Culture Fit
Some candidates have had 3 rounds (OA + 1 tech + HM) and some senior/experienced folks have seen an extra design or HR round. But the four-step loop above is the most common structure.
3. Round 1 – Online Assessment (OA)
Format our learners have seen
Duration: ~60–90 minutes
Question mix:
1–2 coding problems (easy → medium/medium-hard)
~20–30 MCQs on CS fundamentals, time complexity, and language basics
The OA is usually the biggest filter, so don’t treat it as a warm-up.
Types of questions
MCQs often cover:
Time & space complexity, recursion
OS basics (threads, deadlocks, scheduling)
DBMS & SQL (indexes, transactions, normalization)
OOP (inheritance, polymorphism, interfaces)
Coding questions our community has faced include:
DP-style problems similar to “Minimum Cost Tickets”
Classic LeetCode medium questions:
k-th smallest in BST
coin-change variations
stock-buy-sell / prefix-sum variants
What seems to matter most
From repeated experiences:
Solving at least one coding problem fully, and writing a partially correct but well-reasoned solution for the other.
Doing reasoned MCQs—not blind guessing. Fundamentals really matter here.
Showing awareness of complexity even when you don’t fully optimize.
How to prep for OA
30–50 LeetCode mediums on arrays, DP, graphs.
Quick revision of OS, DBMS, OOP, and complexity theory.
Timed practice tests combining MCQs + coding.
4. Round 2 – DSA / Problem-Solving Interview
Once you clear the OA, you’ll have a live problem-solving round with a Groww engineer.
Format
Duration: ~60 minutes
Questions: ~2 main DSA problems (occasionally a small third one or some CS questions).
Question patterns our community faced
Arrays & strings
sliding window (longest substring with constraints)
frequency counting, subarray sums, prefix sums
Dynamic Programming
ways to decode a string
coin change / min-cost / counting paths problems
Graphs & Trees
BFS/DFS, shortest path
topological sort, k-th smallest in BST
Role-specific twists:
SDET: DSA plus debugging, test-case design, and basic automation concepts.
Android/Web: a few questions on lifecycle, threading, coroutines (Android) or JS/React basics (web), along with DSA.
What Groww engineers seem to evaluate
From how feedback conversations have gone:
Can you start with a brute-force that’s obviously correct?
Do you talk through your thought process instead of silently coding?
Can you move from O(n²) to O(n log n) or O(n) with clear reasoning?
How well do you handle edge cases—empty inputs, duplicates, large constraints?
The best-performing learners usually walk through 2–3 ideas in sequence:
Naive but correct.
Slight optimization.
Final efficient version with clear complexity analysis.
5. Round 3 – Machine Coding / Low-Level Design
This is where Groww checks whether you can build real features like a product engineer.
Format
Duration: ~60–90 minutes
Task: Design and implement one end-to-end system or feature in code.
You code in your preferred language while explaining design choices.
Examples our mentors & learners have seen
Build a Splitwise-style expense sharing system: users, groups, different ways of splitting, settlement logic.
Design a simple music streaming app: songs, playlists, search, likes, basic playback.
Implement core workflows for fintech-style features:
trading engine / order book basics
SIP scheduling and status tracking
simple ledger/wallet functionality
What they expect in your solution
Good object modeling
clear entities (User, Expense, Group, Transaction, Playlist, Order…)
each class with a single responsibility
Data structures & storage
how you maintain data in memory
rough DB-table thinking, if asked
APIs / methods
add/update operations
queries (get balance, get playlist, get pending orders)
Edge cases & validations
invalid inputs, duplicate actions, race-like situations
Running code
not just high-level diagrams—actual working code with sample runs.
Internal feedback from our community is consistent: this round strongly differentiates “I solve LeetCode” from “I can build a real product feature in an hour.”
6. Round 4 – Hiring Manager & Culture Fit
The last round connects your technical skills with Groww’s culture and the team’s expectations.
Format
Duration: 45–60 minutes
Focus: Deep dive on projects + behavioral questions; sometimes a small design or DSA puzzle at the end.
Themes our mentors noticed
Customer-first mindset
“Tell me about a time you prioritized user experience or safety over convenience for the team.”
“How did you think about risk in a money-related feature?”
Ownership & bias for action
Groww explicitly values ownership and entrepreneurial thinking.“Describe a feature or issue you owned end-to-end.”
“Tell me about a production issue: how you debugged it, fixed it, and what you changed long-term.”
Simplicity & long-term thinking
Their values talk about simplicity and long-term focus in product and tech.“Give an example where you chose a simple design over something fancy.”
“What technical debt have you intentionally taken on, and how did you plan to pay it back?”
Metrics & impact
HM rounds appreciate answers with numbers:reduced p95 latency, improved throughput
cut error-rate / crash-rate
improved conversions or user engagement
Learners who walk in with 2–3 strong, metric-backed project stories generally feel much more confident in this round.