In August 2025, I appeared for the Product Software Engineer (PSE) Intern interview at Razorpay through an on-campus recruitment drive conducted in online mode. The opportunity was shared by our Training and Placement Office (TPO).
The internship offered a stipend of â‚ą50,000 per month along with a Pre-Placement Offer (PPO) of 8.5 LPA. A total of 18 students from our campus were shortlisted.
The selection process consisted of:
- 1. Technical Interview
- 2. Hiring Manager (HM) Interview
Round 1: Technical Interview
This round was conducted on Google Meet and lasted around 1 hour. The interview was mainly resume and project-driven. Since most of my projects were based on AI and machine learning, the interviewer asked conceptual questions such as supervised vs unsupervised learning, the difference between machine learning and deep learning, neural networks, and the KNN algorithm, which I explained in detail, and the interviewer seemed satisfied with my answers.
After that, we discussed my MERN stack projects, including why I built them, the problems they solved, and questions related to API design, backend architecture, and database schema. I was also asked several Node.js questions, including asynchronous programming, non-blocking I/O, the single-threaded nature of Node.js, callback functions, and callback hell.
The interviewer then gave me two coding questions—one on string manipulation and another on an array-based problem. I first explained my approach and then wrote the code, and the interviewer was satisfied with my solutions. Towards the end, I was asked core CS questions from Operating Systems (process vs threads, FCFS scheduling), Computer Networks (TCP vs UDP), and SQL, including types of joins and writing a query using GROUP BY and HAVING. I cleared this round and received the confirmation email the same night.
Round 2: Hiring Manager (HM) Interview
This round lasted around 30 minutes and started with general questions, such as why I chose my college. The interviewer then moved to a resume-based discussion and asked follow-up questions on my projects and skills. At that time, my resume included Kafka and PostgreSQL, which I had not used in my projects and did not have in-depth knowledge of. When asked detailed questions on these technologies, I struggled to answer them properly. The interviewer also asked why Razorpay and whether I understood the PSE Intern role. At the end, I asked questions related to work culture and learning opportunities.
Final Outcome & Learnings:
I was not selected, while other 3 candidates who cleared Round 1 received the offer.
However, this interview taught me an important lesson: only mention skills on your resume that you can confidently explain in depth, as interviews are highly resume-driven.
Overall, it was a valuable learning experience that helped me prepare better for future interviews.
