PayPal Interview Experience

PayPal Interview Experience 2022-2023

Find latest PayPal Interview Experience of selected candidates from 2022 batch. Prepare for your PayPal interview, by going through the Interview Experiences of various candidates. We have also provided PayPal interview questions and answers.

Page Highlights:

About PayPal

PayPal Holdings Inc, is an American financial technology company providing online payment services to the majority of the countries globally. In India PayPal has 4 offices, in Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad. They are often hiring for these offices, both via on campus as well as off campus drives.

Recruitment Process

Like most Product based companies, PayPal conducts multiple rounds in its hiring. The hiring pattern varies for different tier colleges as well as for off campus drive. The most common pattern which is followed by PayPal is:

  • Online Coding Round
  • Technical Interview 1
  • Technical Interview 2
  • HR/Managerial Interview

PayPal Eligibility Criteria

  • 85% or equivalent in X and XII
  • 85% or equivalent in BE/B.Tech
  • No standing arrears

PayPal On Campus Interview Experience for SDE

PayPal visited our campus, hiring for SDE 1 role. Students with no stranding arrears and  cgpa of 8.5 and above were asked to apply. I applied for the drive, and after a week I got the email that I was shortlisted and that I have to attend the Online Assessment.

Round 1:- PayPal Online Assessment

It was conducted on HacketEarth and was a 2 hour long test. There were 2 coding questions, one of them was an easy one, while the other was comparatively hard.

1.Given a n*m chessboard and each non-empty cell contains either of the three pieces B, R and Q. B can move diagonally, R can move horizontally or vertically, Q can move in any direction in which B and R can move. Find the total number of valid chess moves possible.

2.Given a string with lowercase letters and “?” where each “?” can be replaced by any lowercase character, find the total number of strings such that the first and last characters are the same and no adjacent characters are the same.

I had to solve this question using dynamic programming.

Round 2: PayPal Technical Interview 1

After the online assessment round 31 students were shortlisted. The shortlisted students had to appear for the technical interviews. There were two technical interview. The first technical interview was around an hour long. There was one coding question that took around 45 minutes , as the interviewer kept adding conditions.

PayPal Interview Questions:

1.Introduce Yourself

2. Explain your project.

I had already prepared a small presentation. I asked him if I can show him, via screenshare. The interviewer agreed and I gave him a quick run through my project. After which he asked me about the Machine Learnings  algorithms that I used in my project. He also asked if I faced any difficulties while working on it, and how did I overcome those.

3. This was a coding question. Find mutual friends between person A and B.

I coded this using graphs and BSF traversal. The interviewer had asked me to explain the steps. I executed a dry run of my code, after the interviewer added a constraint, suggested to include a mutual friend who is closest in terms of cultural aspects or common interests.

I coded that, by assigning numerical weightage for the common interests. 

4. The second question was an anagram question. Given an array of strings, return all groups of strings that are anagrams, The groups must be created in order of their appearance in the original array.

This question took 5-7 minutes, and I explained my code through a dry run. The interviewer asked about the time complexity of the program.

This was all from my first PayPal technical interview. After this round was over, the interviewer asked me if I had any questions. I had none, so he told me to leave the meeting. The second Technical Interview was conducted two days later.

Round 3: PayPal Technical Interview 2

This was the second technical interview, and lasted an hour as well.

PayPal Technical Interview Questions

1.The interviewer displayed a tree and an output of the traversal. He asked me to write a program to get that output.

This was a vertical order traversal of a binary tree, question.

2.The second question, he asked me to get the quotient without using the “/”, “*”,”%” operators.

I coded this using the “-” operator. After I finished the interviewer asked  me to reduce the time complexity, since if the dividend is much greater than the divisor, then my approach will consume a lot of time. At first I could not understand how to solve it. But the interviewer gave me some hints, and I was able to code it after that.

Round 4: Hiring Manager Round

This was the last round, which took place for around half an hour. The interviewer asked me to introduce myself and then asked me only one question.

Question

He showed me a puzzle where n-balloons were there and I had to burst maximum balloons using an arrow.

The concept of this question is similar to finding a maximum number of points in a line. I followed the same, and coded a solution, however the interviewer was not satisfied. He told me to assume the positions of balloons in a matrix where 1 represents if the balloon is present and versa. I had to find which row or column or diagonal had the maximum number of 1’s. After sometime I was able to solve it.

The interviewer asked me if I had any questions for him, I asked about the work culture and job profile, which he answered. After this he told me to wait for the results and the call ended.

The results came, and from our campus a total of 13 candidates were selected of which 8 including me were hired for full time role, while 5 were given an internship.

PayPal Off Campus Interview Experience

I got to know via PrepInsta’s Instagram handle that PayPal was hiring. I registered through there page, and got an email that to appear for the recruitment. There were totally 4 rounds,

  • Online Assessment Round
  • Technical Interview 1
  • Technical Interview 2
  • HR Interview

I will try to explain each round in details.

Round 1: Online Assessment Round

The online assessment round was a coding test, and was conducted on Hackerrank. There were two questions, and the duration of the test was 2 hours.

The coding questions asked in this round were:-

  1. Given an array and a number x, you must count the number of subarrays in which x is the highest value.
  2. A program that can paint a nx3 grid in red, green, and blue in such a way that no row or column contains cells that are all the same color is needed for an automated painting system. Provided n rows, calculate the number of valid patterns that can be painted.

I was able to solve both the questions within the given time, and got a call for the technical interview 1.

Round 2: Paypal Technical Interview 1

The first technical interview had coding questions, and the whole round was around an hour long. The interviewer first asked me to introduce myself and then asked me to share my scree. He instructed me to open any IDE and write programs for the problem statement he will be giving. I asked him if he preferred any particular language, he told me I can use whichever I want. I opened Visual Studio Code and started coding.

Question 1:

To count the number of subarrays in an array with a number as ‘y’ where y=maximum.

Question 2:

  • Are the two intervals given intersecting? (completely optimised)

Sample Input – [2, 5], [4, 7]

Sample Output – True

Sample Input – [2, 3], [4, 7]

Sample Output – False

I solved and executed both the questions and explained my approach to the interviewer. He seemed impressed. Then he asked me some theoretical questions.

Question 3: Compare Bubble Sort and Merge Sort

Question 4: Some DBMS questions including:

  1. What are joins?
  2. What is relationship?

You can find the answers to the above question and more DBMS Technical Interview Questions here: DBMS Technical Interview Questions

This was all from the first Technical Interview. 

Round 3: PayPal Technical Interview -2

This round also lasted an hour. There were no theory questions asked. The first twenty-twenty five minutes were based on my final year project. And then the interviewer gave me two questions to code.

Question 1: Project Discussion

The interviewer asked me to explain my final year project. I gave him a brief overview of my project. Some of the follow up questions included:

  1. What was your role in the project?
  2. Did you face any difficulty while making the project? How did you overcome?
  3. Then he asked me a bunch of questions on the technicality of the project, including the technologies  used and the software.

After he was done with the project, the interviewer asked me to open any IDE and share my screen. The next two questions were coding questions

Question 2:

The first question was to find the minimum number of arrows to burst all balloons in an array. Where the balloons are represented as point[i], over the area of x-coordinates. 

Question 3:

You are given an array, arr, with the i-th element indicating the maximum number of jumps you can make from that index. You must find the smallest number of jumps to get from the first to the last index.

Round 4: PayPal HR Round

The last round was the HR round. This was an easy round, and there were no technical questions. The interviewer asked me some behavioral questions and one puzzle question. 

Questions:

1.He asked me this puzzle: Burning Rope Puzzle  .  

2.He asked me some scenario type questions like:

  • have you ever worked under pressure?
  • have you ever led a team?

3.Finally he asked me what I know about PayPal. 

4. Do you have any questions for me?

This was all the questions he asked. I answered them all to the best of my knowledge. I asked the interviewer what is  a normal day for any PayPal employee? He answered my question and that was the end of my interview. About a week later I heard from them that I was selected for SDE 1 profile.

FAQs on PayPal Interview Experience

Question: Are PayPal interviews tough?

Answer:-

Like most product based companies, PayPal conducts multiple technical interviews and put heavy emphasis on a candidate’s coding skills and practical application of their technical skills.

Question: How do I pass a PayPal interview?

Answer:-

PayPal interviews focuses a lot on the coding skills and practical application of technical skills of candidates.

Question: How do I prepare for online paypal test?

Answer:-

The online test for PayPal consists of two coding questions, You can check out our Top 100 Codes to prepare for the exam.

Question: What are the most important skills and qualities needed to work at PayPal?

Answer:-

Some of the skills that you should develop to work at product based companies like PayPal are:

  • communication skills
  • customer service skills
  • team management
  • critical thinking

along with these you should also have good programming knowledge and technical skills.

Question: How long does PayPal take to hire?

Answer:-

The whole process of hiring for PayPal is around 3-4 weeks, from online assessment to final results and offer letter.

Question: How many rounds of interview are there in PayPal India?

Answer:-

There are totally 3 interview rounds in PayPal.

  • 2 technical interviews
  • 1 managerial interview