PayPal || Entry/Mid-Level || Interview Experience (Full-Stack Software Engineer)
Question Details
Hello, I applied for Full-Stack Software Engineer position @ PayPal, job tagged as entry/mid level at San Jose location. Got reached out by the recruiter first and had a call discussing...
Full Details
Hello, I applied for Full-Stack Software Engineer position @ PayPal, job tagged as entry/mid level at San Jose location.
Got reached out by the recruiter first and had a call discussing my resume and scheduled a phone screening interview.
Phone Screen Round: https://leetcode.com/problems/kth-largest-element-in-an-array/description/ (Discussed both Sorting and Heap approach)
Interviewer was happy and I proceded onto the next final-interview loop.
Lots of miscommunication from recruiter\'s end and process was riddled with several reschedules during the entire process.
Round 1 Data Structures & OOP Design: Standard resume grilling, basic and intermediate questions on data-structures (why binary search has log(n) time-complexity) and other OOP questions and a LC type backtracking problem.
https://leetcode.com/problems/subsets/description/
https://leetcode.com/problems/subsets-ii/description/
Round 2
System Design Design airplane booking system like Expedia. (Recruiter had informed that this would be low-level but high-level system design was asked in interview.)
Round 3 Data Structures & OOP Design: Same as Round 1 but questions were on Tries, Intervals and basic time-complexity of arrays, hashmaps, and search algorithms.
https://leetcode.com/problems/construct-binary-tree-from-preorder-and-inorder-traversal/
https://leetcode.com/problems/meeting-rooms-ii/
Round 4 Manager/
Behavioral Despite this being a behavioral round, the manager asked me a series of system design questions related to scalability, availibility and specific situations to scale an end to end system to handle high throughput and 1 behavioral question at the end of the interview (related to conflict management).
Recieved a rejection mail around 1 week after the final interview round.
About This Question
This is a reported interview question from a paypal interview for a eng manager role (mid level) during the recruiter round reported in 2025.
It covers the following topics: Hash Table, Arrays, Binary Tree, Sorting, Binary Search, System Design, Backtracking, Oop, Heap, Behavioral, Recursion, Stack .
Difficulty rating: Easy