DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer Interview Experience at Razorpay – 2026

This 90-minute online assessment has two distinct sections. The MCQ section covers roughly 15 questions weighted by difficulty (+2, +4, +6 points) spanning operating systems (process scheduling, deadlock conditions), DBMS (normal forms, transaction isolation levels), and basic OOP concepts. The coding section has three problems of increasing weight (+20, +50, +50): a sliding-window problem to find any subarray of a given size with a sum exceeding a threshold, a variant of a classic 'rescue boat' two-pointer problem involving weight capacity constraints, and a third problem on interval merging under a time constraint that many candidates don't fully complete.

This round mixes API design questions with a live SQL task and Kubernetes-specific scenarios. On the API side, candidates are asked how to design idempotency into a payment API so that a client retrying a timed-out request does not accidentally double-charge a customer - a strong answer centers on an idempotency key supplied by the client and enforced with a unique constraint at the database layer. The SQL task asks for a query identifying duplicate transaction records that differ only in a timestamp field. On Kubernetes, the interviewer asks how to size resource requests and limits for a payment processing pod that has unpredictable but latency-sensitive traffic, and what happens if the limit is set too aggressively low.

Candidates are asked to design the infrastructure and monitoring approach for a UPI-style payment transaction system end to end. A strong answer structures around three concerns: fault tolerance (using a message queue to decouple transaction intake from downstream processing so a downstream outage does not lose transactions), consistency (using a saga pattern or distributed transaction approach for the multi-step debit-then-credit flow rather than a single unsafe two-phase commit across services), and monitoring (defining specific alerts on transaction success rate dropping below a threshold and on payment processing latency p99 exceeding a set bound). Interviewers tend to push hardest on what happens when the credit step fails after the debit step has already succeeded, wanting a concrete reconciliation and compensation strategy, not just 'roll back'.

This is a cultural fit conversation rather than a technical one. Questions focus on how a candidate handles disagreement with a teammate over a technical approach, and a specific scenario: what to do if a senior engineer pushes for a design genuinely believed to be wrong under time pressure. The round evaluates communication style and whether a candidate can disagree constructively rather than either capitulating silently or becoming combative.

This is a standard closing HR discussion on compensation expectations, current notice period, and confirming there are no other overlapping offers in play that might affect the timeline.