Razorpay Interview Process Overview
Razorpay is one of India's most respected fintech companies and one of the harder interviews for Software Engineers. The process typically includes:
1. **Online Assessment (OA)**: 2 DSA problems, 90 minutes. LeetCode medium-hard difficulty. 2. **Technical Round 1**: DSA + Problem Solving (60 min). Focus on arrays, strings, trees. 3. **Technical Round 2**: System Design or Advanced DSA (60 min). 4. **Technical Round 3 / Bar Raiser**: Deep dive into past projects, system design at scale. 5. **HR / Culture Fit**: Values alignment, salary discussion.
Razorpay Technical Interview: Real Questions Asked
**DSA Questions (commonly reported):** - Find the longest substring without repeating characters (sliding window) - LRU Cache implementation - Lowest Common Ancestor in a BST - Design a rate limiter (token bucket algorithm) - Flatten a nested dictionary
**System Design Questions:** - Design Razorpay's payment gateway (most common — know this cold) - Design a URL shortener with high availability - Design a notification system for 10M users - Design a fraud detection system
**Project Deep-Dive:** Expect 3-4 follow-up questions on every project you mention. Know your code, every decision, every trade-off.
System Design: Razorpay Payment Gateway Deep Dive
This is the most commonly asked system design at Razorpay. Know these components:
- **API Layer**: REST APIs with idempotency keys (critical for payments) - **Payment Router**: Routes to bank/card networks - **State Machine**: Each payment has states (initiated → processing → success/failure) - **Retry Logic**: Exponential backoff for transient failures - **Webhooks**: For merchant notification of payment status - **Database**: PostgreSQL for transactions (ACID compliance), Redis for session/idempotency cache - **Security**: PCI-DSS compliance, tokenization of card data
Draw the full architecture diagram before explaining each component.
Razorpay Bar Raiser Round Tips
The Bar Raiser is a senior engineer (often from a different team) who evaluates if you raise the average bar at Razorpay.
What they look for: - Do you understand the "why" behind your decisions? - Can you think at scale (10x, 100x current load)? - Do you know the trade-offs, not just the solution? - How do you respond to ambiguity?
Prep: Re-read your own resume. For every project, prepare answers for "Why did you choose X over Y?", "What would you do differently?", "How would this scale to 10M users?"
Razorpay Preparation Timeline
**4 weeks out**: Cover core DSA — arrays, linked lists, trees, graphs, DP fundamentals. **3 weeks out**: LeetCode medium problems in batches by topic. 2-3 problems/day. **2 weeks out**: System design fundamentals — load balancing, caching, database sharding, CAP theorem. **1 week out**: Full mock interviews. Use PrerakAI to simulate Razorpay rounds with scored feedback. **Day before**: Light review, sleep well. Trust the preparation.