cswork / libraryOpen practice workspace

Interview guides · Edgeverve

Edgeverve Software Engineer Interview Guide

Edgeverve Software Engineer interview guide: reported rounds, questions and how candidates describe the process.

The 60-second brief

As a Software Engineer at Edgeverve, you are at the core of building and scaling enterprise-grade products that transform business operations. You will work on sophisticated platforms, such as Finacle or the AssistEdge automation suite, where your code directly impacts the efficiency and digital transformation of global organizations. The role is pivotal, requiring a blend of high-level architectural thinking and precise, low-level technical execution. You will find yourself in an environment that values both product-driven innovation and the rigorous standards of a service-oriented mindset. Whether you are optimizing complex algorithms for performance or designing scalable microservices, your work will be foundational to Edgeverve’s market positioning.

This guide is scoped to a Software Engineer candidate at Edgeverve.

Focus areas

  • Core Java
  • Data Structures
  • Algorithms

The Edgeverve interview process

Edgeverve candidates report 3 rounds over 3-5 weeks. The stages below are what candidates describe, not a published process.

Coding Assessment

Candidates complete a coding assessment to evaluate their technical skills.

What to demonstrate

  • Candidates complete a coding assessment to evaluate their technical skills
  • Depth in Core Java

How to prepare

  • Answer aloud and timed: Write a program to reverse every word in a given string.
  • Answer aloud and timed: Given an array, find the unique characters or identify duplicates.

Technical Interviews

A series of technical interviews with individual contributors, managers, and occasionally architects.

What to demonstrate

  • A series of technical interviews with individual contributors, managers, and occasionally architects
  • Depth in Core Java

How to prepare

  • Answer aloud and timed: Implement an algorithm to manipulate two linked lists and join them.
  • Answer aloud and timed: Solve a dynamic programming problem, such as finding a specific sequence or path.

Managerial Discussions

Final discussions with managerial staff to assess team fit and senior-level evaluation.

What to demonstrate

  • Final discussions with managerial staff to assess team fit and senior-level evaluation
  • Depth in Core Java

How to prepare

  • Answer aloud and timed: Provide a solution to a string manipulation problem, such as removing vowels or consonants.
  • Answer aloud and timed: Explain the four pillars of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) with practical examples.

Where candidates lose points

Prioritize the Coding Test

Your performance on the initial online assessment is the strongest predictor of whether you will move forward. Treat it as a high-stakes exam.

Master Your Resume

Expect the interviewers to pick apart every project listed. Be ready to explain the challenges you faced and how you overcame them.

Focus on SQL

Do not overlook database concepts. Even for pure development roles, a solid understanding of SQL is a common requirement at Edgeverve.

Be Honest About Your Limits

If you don't know an answer, it is better to explain your reasoning or how you would find the answer than to guess.

Questions & practice

Write a program to reverse every word in a given string.

Medium · Coding and Data Structures

Approach

  1. Restate the input: its shape, its size, and what is guaranteed about it.
  2. Name the brute-force solution and its complexity before improving on it.
  3. Choose the data structure from the access pattern, not from familiarity.
  4. State the target complexity and say which constraint rules the naive version out.

Follow-up

  • How does this change if the input no longer fits in memory?
  • What is the worst case, and how likely is it on real data?

Given an array, find the unique characters or identify duplicates.

Medium · Coding and Data Structures

Approach

  1. Restate the input: its shape, its size, and what is guaranteed about it.
  2. Name the brute-force solution and its complexity before improving on it.
  3. Choose the data structure from the access pattern, not from familiarity.
  4. State the target complexity and say which constraint rules the naive version out.

Follow-up

  • How does this change if the input no longer fits in memory?
  • What is the worst case, and how likely is it on real data?

Implement an algorithm to manipulate two linked lists and join them.

Medium · Coding and Data Structures

Approach

  1. Restate the input: its shape, its size, and what is guaranteed about it.
  2. Name the brute-force solution and its complexity before improving on it.
  3. Choose the data structure from the access pattern, not from familiarity.
  4. State the target complexity and say which constraint rules the naive version out.

Follow-up

  • How does this change if the input no longer fits in memory?
  • What is the worst case, and how likely is it on real data?

Solve a dynamic programming problem, such as finding a specific sequence or path.

Medium · Coding and Data Structures

Approach

  1. Restate the input: its shape, its size, and what is guaranteed about it.
  2. Name the brute-force solution and its complexity before improving on it.
  3. Choose the data structure from the access pattern, not from familiarity.
  4. State the target complexity and say which constraint rules the naive version out.

Follow-up

  • How does this change if the input no longer fits in memory?
  • What is the worst case, and how likely is it on real data?

Provide a solution to a string manipulation problem, such as removing vowels or consonants.

Medium · Coding and Data Structures

Approach

  1. Restate the input: its shape, its size, and what is guaranteed about it.
  2. Name the brute-force solution and its complexity before improving on it.
  3. Choose the data structure from the access pattern, not from familiarity.
  4. State the target complexity and say which constraint rules the naive version out.

Follow-up

  • How does this change if the input no longer fits in memory?
  • What is the worst case, and how likely is it on real data?

What are the differences between malloc and calloc in C, and what is a dangling pointer?

Medium · Technical Fundamentals (CS Concepts)

Approach

  1. Say what the runtime actually does before reasoning about the code.
  2. Name what is shared across threads and what owns each piece of state.
  3. Identify the window where an invariant is briefly untrue.
  4. Distinguish a value from a reference to it, and say which one you handed out.

Follow-up

  • What happens if two callers reach this at the same time?
  • Where could this allocate more than you expect?

Why do you want to join Edgeverve, and what do you know about our banking or automation products?

Medium · Behavioral and Project-Based Discussion

Approach

  1. Name the grain you start from and join outward from it.
  2. Check whether any join is one-to-many before aggregating, or the sums inflate.
  3. Say which index the query would use, and what makes it unusable.
  4. Handle the rows that do not match: that is usually the actual question.

Follow-up

  • How does the query change if that join becomes one-to-many?
  • What happens to this when the table is ten times larger?

Denormalise tenant onto revisions and backfill it live

Hard · denormalisation · online migration · backfill

resource_revision (revision_id, resource_id, version, actor_user_id, change_kind, patch, request_id, created_at) has 400M rows and no tenant column; tenant_id lives only on resource. Two reads need it: a tenant-scoped audit feed ordered by created_at DESC, and an offboarding purge. Both join back to resource today. Justify adding tenant_id to resource_revision against those two reads, name the anomaly the copy introduces and the constraint that prevents it, then give the ordered migration for a live table taking 1.2k writes/second — the lock each step takes, how the backfill is batched, and where each step stops being reversible. PostgreSQL 16.

Approach

  1. Justify from the access path rather than from taste. Without the column, the audit feed either scans resource_revision by created_at and discards other tenants' rows, or resolves the tenant's resource_ids first and probes with them — both proportional to the tenant's whole history rather than to one page. With (tenant_id, created_at DESC, revision_id DESC) it is a seek that stops at 50 rows, and the purge becomes a ranged delete instead of a join.
  2. Name the cost exactly: a second copy of a fact can disagree with the first. Make the disagreement unwritable rather than documented — add UNIQUE (resource_id, tenant_id) on resource so it can serve as a foreign-key target, then FOREIGN KEY (resource_id, tenant_id) REFERENCES resource (resource_id, tenant_id) on the revision table. A revision can then only ever carry its parent's tenant.
  3. Step one, expand: ALTER TABLE resource_revision ADD COLUMN tenant_id BIGINT NULL, with no default, so it is a catalogue change and no rewrite. It still needs ACCESS EXCLUSIVE for an instant, and that instant queues behind the longest open transaction on the table while every later query queues behind it — set lock_timeout to 2s and retry rather than wait.
  4. Step two, dual-write: deploy the writer that populates tenant_id on every new revision while reads still use the join. Reversible by redeploying the previous build, because nothing reads the column yet.

Follow-up

  • The backfill is half finished and a rollback is required. What state is the table in, and what does the previous build do with a half-populated column?
  • How do you verify the backfill actually finished, given rows are still being inserted while it runs?

Explain the four pillars of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) with practical examples.

Medium · Technical Fundamentals (CS Concepts)

Approach

  1. Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
  2. State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
  3. Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
  4. Work from the requirement backwards to the design.

Follow-up

  • What assumption would you test first?
  • How would you know your answer was wrong?

Explain the ACID properties of a database and provide a scenario where they are critical.

Medium · Technical Fundamentals (CS Concepts)

Approach

  1. Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
  2. State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
  3. Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
  4. Work from the requirement backwards to the design.

Follow-up

  • What assumption would you test first?
  • How would you know your answer was wrong?

Describe the difference between Waterfall and Agile models in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

Medium · Technical Fundamentals (CS Concepts)

Approach

  1. Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
  2. State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
  3. Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
  4. Work from the requirement backwards to the design.

Follow-up

  • What assumption would you test first?
  • How would you know your answer was wrong?

Can you explain common Linux commands and their utility in server management?

Medium · Technical Fundamentals (CS Concepts)

Approach

  1. Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
  2. State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
  3. Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
  4. Work from the requirement backwards to the design.

Follow-up

  • What assumption would you test first?
  • How would you know your answer was wrong?

Walk me through the architecture of your most recent project.

Medium · Behavioral and Project-Based Discussion

Approach

  1. Fix the scope first: who calls this, how often, and what they do when it fails.
  2. Name the read and write paths separately; they rarely have the same bottleneck.
  3. Choose a partition key and say what query it makes expensive.
  4. State the consistency you need, and where you are willing to be stale.

Follow-up

  • What breaks first when traffic grows ten times?
  • How does this behave when that dependency is down for an hour?

Edge instances grow 400 MB per hour until the nightly restart

Hard · memory leak · heap analysis · metric cardinality

Edge API instances start at 700 MB resident and grow about 400 MB/hour; a nightly rolling restart has hidden it for weeks. Growth continues unchanged when request rate halves overnight, p99 degrades in the last hours before an instance is recycled, and heap used immediately after a forced full GC rises monotonically. The service holds no product state. Name the discriminating measurement that separates the plausible causes, give the most likely cause, and give the fix and how you would verify it.

Approach

  1. Separate resident memory from live heap first, because they fail differently. Resident size can grow from fragmentation, native buffers or thread stacks while the heap is flat; heap used after a full GC rising monotonically is the measurement that says objects are reachable and not being released. You already have it, so this is retention, not fragmentation, and that closes off half the candidate list.
  2. Use the rate's independence from traffic as the discriminator. Growth that continues at half the request rate rules out per-request objects that are merely slow to collect and points at a structure that grows with distinct values observed rather than with call volume. Write the candidates that have that property: a metrics registry keyed on a high-cardinality label, an unevicted cache, an interner, a per-key lock map.
  3. Take two heap snapshots an hour apart and diff by retained size, reading the dominator tree, not by allocation count or instance count. Expect one root holding a map with millions of entries, then follow the reference chain to the code that inserts and never removes. Allocation profilers point at churn, which is the wrong signal here.
  4. The candidate that fits this service is an observability label carrying an identifier, such as a request path recorded before templating so that /v1/resources/48213 becomes its own metric series. That grows with distinct ids seen, is independent of rate, and explains the late p99 degradation, since GC cost rises with the size of the live set.

Follow-up

  • Post-GC heap is now flat but resident size still creeps. What are you looking at, and does it matter?
  • How would you have detected this before an OOM, given the nightly restart masked the trend?

Suggested practice checklist

Built from the rounds and topics Edgeverve candidates report.

Day 1 — Map the Edgeverve loop

  • Write out the reported sequence: Coding Assessment, Technical Interviews, Managerial Discussions.
  • For each round, write one sentence on what it is judging, from the description above, and mark the one you are least ready for.

Deliverable: A one-page map of the 3 reported rounds, with the weakest marked.

Day 2 — Work Core Java

  • Spend the session on Core Java, which Edgeverve candidates report being tested on.
  • Write one worked example in Core Java and time yourself on it.

Deliverable: One timed worked example in Core Java.

Day 3 — Work Data Structures

  • Spend the session on Data Structures, which Edgeverve candidates report being tested on.
  • Write one worked example in Data Structures and time yourself on it.

Deliverable: One timed worked example in Data Structures.

Day 4 — Work Algorithms

  • Spend the session on Algorithms, which Edgeverve candidates report being tested on.
  • Write one worked example in Algorithms and time yourself on it.

Deliverable: One timed worked example in Algorithms.

Day 5 — Answer out loud: Coding and Data Structures

  • Answer aloud, timed: Write a program to reverse every word in a given string.
  • Answer aloud, timed: Given an array, find the unique characters or identify duplicates.

Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Coding and Data Structures question(s), under time.

Day 6 — Answer out loud: Technical Fundamentals (CS Concepts)

  • Answer aloud, timed: Explain the four pillars of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) with practical examples.
  • Answer aloud, timed: What are the differences between malloc and calloc in C, and what is a dangling pointer?

Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Technical Fundamentals (CS Concepts) question(s), under time.

Day 7 — Answer out loud: Behavioral and Project-Based Discussion

  • Answer aloud, timed: Walk me through the architecture of your most recent project.
  • Answer aloud, timed: How do you handle disagreements within a technical team?

Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Behavioral and Project-Based Discussion question(s), under time.

Behavioural preparation

Behavioural rounds judge the decision you made and what it cost.

How do you handle disagreements within a technical team?

Medium · Behavioral and Project-Based Discussion

Approach

  1. Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
  2. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
  3. Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
  4. Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.

Follow-up

  • What would you do differently if you ran that again?
  • How did you know your change caused the improvement?

Describe a time you had to optimize a system under high load.

Medium · Behavioral and Project-Based Discussion

Approach

  1. Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
  2. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
  3. Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
  4. Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.

Follow-up

  • What would you do differently if you ran that again?
  • How did you know your change caused the improvement?

How do you manage your time when working on multiple modules simultaneously?

Medium · Behavioral and Project-Based Discussion

Approach

  1. Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
  2. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
  3. Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
  4. Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.

Follow-up

  • What would you do differently if you ran that again?
  • How did you know your change caused the improvement?