Airtel Payments Bank Software Engineer interview with cab-booking database design

After a recruiter call, I had an assessment and then a couple of deeper conversations. The first round checked coding and fundamentals. I worked through cab-booking-style queries, including how to normalize a database and what indexes to add on relevant columns. Java collections also came up, along with a linked-list DSA challenge.

The technical discussion felt more like a guided deep dive than a rapid-fire test. We covered REST, databases, operating systems, my projects, and how I had approached them. The conversation narrowed to indexing, both the concept and implementation, and I solved a DSA problem I had chosen as a favorite or challenging one.

The difficulty felt average. I left with the sense that the interviewers cared about approach and communication as much as getting to an answer quickly.

Location: Gurgaon, Haryana. Overall feedback: positive. Offer status: got offer.