How to Prepare for an Engineering Interview at PayPal India
PayPal in Q3 of 2021 managed to process transactions close to $310 billion USD. To achieve our goals and surpass those numbers, we are always seeking fundamentally solid engineers.
To democratize financial services to ensure that everyone, regardless of background or economic standing, has access to affordable, convenient and secure products and services to take control of their financial lives.
— PayPal Mission
Our global engineering teams are currently comprised of 4,500 wonderful engineers who operate exceptionally fast, ensuring we progress closer towards our mission. We take pride in what we do and what we achieve, especially in terms of the quality and scale of our operations.
Language Cohorts
While looking at our job postings, you’ll see job titles such as:
- Software Engineer — Web Platforms
- Senior Software Engineer — Payments
- Software Engineer — Reporting
While we are always looking for bright, talented, and motivated engineers to join our world-class team, we don’t expect all engineers to have an in-depth understanding of financial technology (FinTech). PayPal has great product and tech teams who love to talk about and share FinTech knowledge, and help new hires learn about the domain. We believe a great engineer in any stream can make an impact on our mission.
At PayPal, our teams operate around language clusters such as JavaScript and Java and stacks like frontend and backend.
We foster these communities by having dedicated knowledge-sharing sessions, where we help our new and curious engineers to learn. We hold these sessions frequently so that our engineers are never kept waiting for too long.
The following is the entire process—
- Code — Take-Home Assignments, Coding 1, Coding 2
- Design — Coding 2, System Design, Project Retro
- Connect — Project Retro, Hiring Manager
In the following sections, we elaborate on each of these buckets. Note that some rounds are purposefully put in two buckets, owing to the overlap that they have.
Take-Home Assignments (Optional)
Candidates are given take-home assignments to help give PayPal a sense of your work and working style. This also provides us insight into things such as the quality of your work and the finesse with which you operate under time pressure.
The problem statements we pose are close to the types of issues you would need to tackle at PayPal. This helps us gain an understanding of your structural and organizational thinking.
Coding — 1
In classic industry slang, our first coding exercise is a Data Structure and Algorithm (DSA) discussion. We focus on signals, rather than the difficulty of the problem or the genre of the DSA..
The discourse structure is a standard, Problem → Clarifying Questions → Brute Force (Maybe) → Optimizations → Optimized Solution. The only outcome that we anticipate from this assignment is pure blissful code.
Syntactically correct and executable code is well and good, but this is not the grading criteria. Instead, we look for code that is well thought through.
At PayPal, code references often circulate among stakeholders, like Product Managers and Program Managers. Therefore, code clarity, such as naming or code flows, must be understandable to a wide audience.
Coding — 2
In the second coding round, we want to see how our candidates handle a full pull request (PR) review. We want to see if candidates can find improvements in the code snippets we provide. We gather excellent signals from this activity, such as:
- Tests
- Edge cases, such as Null Pointer Exceptions (NPE)
- Readability
- Algorithm and data structure improvisations
- Discussions about framework choice
The full PR review helps candidates stand out from the “LeetCode interviews”, which don’t always paint the complete picture of a candidate’s talents and abilities.
System Design
When given a very high-level problem statement, how do you go about breaking it down into smaller units that can be cohesively combined to deliver the final system? It’s altogether a whiteboard discussion and what we try to ascertain here is something fundamental — what is it that makes a candidate tick?
- Databases — Relational, Non-Relational, Column-oriented, Graph
- Architectures — Micro/Nano Services, Event-Based, Plugin…
- Frameworks — Spring, Express, Vert.x…
- Languages — Java, JavaScript, Rust, Scala…
- Geographies — XDR — Cross Datacenter Replications, Edge CDNs…
Through this test we are looking for one thing — simplicity. You can use anything on this tech planet, but you should be humble and straightforward in your design approach. If you can portrait simplicity, that is it.
Project Nosedive
The project retrospective, or nosedive, is a rigorous activity we do with senior developers. It’s an activity that seeks connection and empathy, since we ask the candidate for straight forward learnings from their work experiences, such as:
- What were the difficult tech challenges that you overcame?
- Can you describe your learning trajectory to us?
- How did you resolve conflicts — like a framework, pattern, or language adoption in your team?
- What complicated systems you have dealt with?
As a connect discussion, the signals are non-objective, as we are just trying to learn their thought processes and know them a little better.
Hiring Manager
The conversation with the hiring manager is another connect dialogue. Candidates can expect a deep dive around the ins and outs of working at PayPal. During this conversation, candidates can make arrangements to connect with their potential team at PayPal.
Before COVID, it was customary for the hiring managers and candidates to have a casual lunch and discuss things candidly. This was an opportunity to ensure that a mutual decision and frame of mind could be established.
We have a strong track record for finding remarkable talent with this process, so we intend to stick with it for the time being.
This process describes the general framework of our tech recruitment and interview process. However, different teams at PayPal may have different recruitment processes. We are always looking forward to meeting and discussing with incredible engineers, so consider sending over your application.
