What is the Razorpay machine-coding round?

A signature ~90-minute round where you build working, extensible code applying SOLID and design patterns — for example a notification system, an in-memory EMI calculator, a load balancer or a pub-sub. It is assessed on the class model, extensibility and clean design, not on exotic algorithms.

Does Razorpay ask a lot of DSA?

For SDE-1 / freshers, yes (a HackerEarth assessment plus a live DSA round). For SDE-2 and above, DSA is often lighter or dropped in favour of the machine-coding and HLD rounds.

What does Razorpay's system-design round cover?

Payments-domain HLD: payment gateways, settlements/reconciliation and notification pipelines, with idempotency keys, Saga/2PC, HMAC-signed webhooks, Kafka at-least-once delivery, dead-letter queues and consistency reasoning.

What language does Razorpay use?

Go (Golang) is primary, alongside Java, with Kafka and Redis (and Node/PHP in parts of the stack). The machine-coding round is usually language-agnostic — use your strongest OOP language.

Razorpay Software Engineer Interview

A signature machine-coding/LLD round, payments HLD on idempotency & Saga, and a bar-raiser project defense.

Financial / fintech India Web-verified 2026-08

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The Razorpay interview, in brief

Razorpay is India's leading full-stack fintech — a payment gateway plus RazorpayX neobanking and Razorpay Capital — powering 100+ Indian unicorns and firms like Airbnb and Airtel at very large transaction volume. It is a top target for Indian product-company engineers wanting payments and back-end depth, and is known for a real machine-coding / low-level-design round, a hallmark of Indian product companies.

A typical funnel is an online assessment (mainly for SDE-1 / freshers), a live DSA round, the signature ~90-minute machine-coding / LLD round, an HLD / payments system-design round, a hiring-manager / bar-raiser round that defends a past project, and an HR round. For SDE-2 and above, DSA is often lighter or dropped in favour of machine coding and HLD.

Interview rounds

1. Online assessment HackerEarth · ~3 coding + ~15 MCQs / ~90 min

Mainly SDE-1 / on-campus. MCQs cover OS/DBMS/CN/OOP; coding skews graph/DP, sometimes SQL. All test cases must pass (no partial credit). Format varies by cycle.
2. DSA round ~60 min · ~2 LeetCode-medium

Clean code, edge cases and complexity. Lighter or dropped for SDE-2+.
3. Machine coding / LLD ~90 min · 1 problem

Signature round: build working, extensible code with SOLID and patterns (notification system, EMI calculator, load balancer, pub-sub).
4. HLD / system design Payments-domain

Payment gateway, settlements/reconciliation, notification pipeline — idempotency, Saga/2PC, webhooks, Kafka, DLQ.
5. Hiring manager / bar raiser Project defense

Walk through a complex system you built and defend the architecture and trade-offs; probes correctness, reliability, observability and role-fit.
6. HR round Fit

Motivation and logistics.

Coding & DSA topics

Arrays, strings & hashingTwo pointers & sliding windowGraphs (BFS/DFS)Dynamic programmingSQL (occasionally)Machine coding / LLD (SOLID)Design patternsOS / DBMS / CN / OOP

System design

Heavily emphasised — LLD at the machine-coding round and HLD at the design round. Strong payments flavour: idempotency keys, distributed transactions (2-phase commit, the Saga pattern), consistent hashing, settlements/reconciliation, ledgers, HMAC-signed webhooks, Kafka fan-out with at-least-once delivery, dead-letter queues and backoff. Recurring prompts: design a payment gateway, a settlements system, a notification system.

Behavioural round

Culture themes include "the best build the best", curiosity, passion and ownership, with engineering values around correctness, reliability and observability. The bar-raiser / hiring-manager round is resume- and project-driven: expect deep dives into your architecture decisions and trade-offs, and a strong emphasis on role alignment (back-end depth for back-end roles).

Representative question categories

Patterns in Razorpay’s style — not verbatim proprietary questions.

Graph / DP coding — Graph or dynamic-programming problems under time pressure in the assessment.
Live DSA — LeetCode-medium coding with clean edge-case handling.
Machine coding / LLD — Build a notification / EMI / payment-splitting system with SOLID and patterns.
Payments HLD — Design an idempotent payments/settlements API with webhooks and reconciliation.
Distributed transactions — Reason about Saga, 2PC, at-least-once delivery and idempotency.
Project defense — Walk through a complex system you built and defend its trade-offs.

How to prepare

Do

Practise machine coding: write compiling, extensible, SOLID-based code fast — this is the differentiator.
Know payments primitives cold: idempotency, Saga, webhooks/HMAC, retries/DLQ, reconciliation.
Prepare to defend a real past project's architecture in depth for the bar-raiser round.
Ensure your background aligns with the role (back-end vs full-stack) before applying — role-fit mismatch is a common rejection.

Avoid

Writing LLD that "works" but ignores extensibility, SOLID and clean interfaces.
In HLD, naming patterns without reasoning about consistency and failure handling.
Vague, unquantified project stories in the bar-raiser round.
Applying to a back-end role with a purely full-stack / front-end narrative.

Who can apply

The ladder runs SDE-1 (fresher entry) → SDE-2 → SSE (Senior SWE) → SDE-3, then staff/leadership. New grads enter via SDE-1 (campus/assessment); experienced hires at SDE-2/SSE/SDE-3, often around four to eight years. Strong project and system-design evidence weighs heavily for lateral hires.

Razorpay interview FAQ

What is the Razorpay machine-coding round?: A signature ~90-minute round where you build working, extensible code applying SOLID and design patterns — for example a notification system, an in-memory EMI calculator, a load balancer or a pub-sub. It is assessed on the class model, extensibility and clean design, not on exotic algorithms.
Does Razorpay ask a lot of DSA?: For SDE-1 / freshers, yes (a HackerEarth assessment plus a live DSA round). For SDE-2 and above, DSA is often lighter or dropped in favour of the machine-coding and HLD rounds.
What does Razorpay's system-design round cover?: Payments-domain HLD: payment gateways, settlements/reconciliation and notification pipelines, with idempotency keys, Saga/2PC, HMAC-signed webhooks, Kafka at-least-once delivery, dead-letter queues and consistency reasoning.
What language does Razorpay use?: Go (Golang) is primary, alongside Java, with Kafka and Redis (and Node/PHP in parts of the stack). The machine-coding round is usually language-agnostic — use your strongest OOP language.

Practise now

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Wrexa Edge is an independent exam-prep platform and is not affiliated with, authorised by, or endorsed by Razorpay. This guide is based on publicly documented interview practice; it does not reproduce any employer’s internal rubric or question bank, and it does not predict a hiring outcome.