Grab | Senior Software Engineer | Interview Experience
Interview Experience
Giving back to leetcode community! Recently I had chance to interview at Grab (Bangalore). Experience: ~6 yrs (Backend) Four Rounds. R1: 2 DSA problems, 1 hour. Q1. https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-palindromic-substring/description/ Q2. https://leetcode.com/problems/trapping-rain-water/ ==> Exact questions from leetcode....
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Giving back to leetcode community!
Recently I had chance to interview at Grab (Bangalore).
Experience: ~6 yrs (Backend)
Four Rounds.
R1: 2 DSA problems, 1 hour.
Q1. https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-palindromic-substring/description/
Q2. https://leetcode.com/problems/trapping-rain-water/
==> Exact questions from leetcode.
R2: Design (HLD), 1 hour.
Q1. Not a standard question from internet. I was asked to design how a payment system would work in below cases, given a user, a merchant\'s QR and user is trying to pay to merchant via card.
\t- merchant & user both onboarded on Grab.
\t- merchant is onboarded but user is not.
\t- user is onboarded but merchant is not.
==> This round was pretty engaging, drilled into things like how intermediary body like
NPCI work. NPCI is with reference to india for UPI. Then following how NPCI worked, he asked to move to card payments. In other contries, this intermediary body will be different like paynow for singapore. Asked for the schema
R3. HM, 1 hour.
Questions around one of my previous projects and related experience.
==> Standard project and behavorial questions.
R4. Cultural fitment, 30 min.
==> Standard questions.
Compensation offered:
Base - 46LPA
Performance Bonus ~ 8LPA
Stock 20K USD vested in 4 years.
About This Question
This is a candidate experience report from a grab interview for a backend role (senior level) during the system design round reported in 2025.
About Grab Interview Reports
This question was reported by a candidate who interviewed at Grab. LeakCode aggregates interview reports from 10+ sources, including 1Point3Acres, Glassdoor, LeetCode Discuss, Blind, Reddit, Indeed, and Nowcoder. Each report is translated where necessary, deduplicated against existing entries, and tagged by company, role, round type, and reporting date.
Use this question as one calibration data point, not a memorization target. Companies typically rotate their question pools every 2-4 months; the exact wording of a 2024 question may differ from what you encounter today. The underlying pattern, difficulty level, and follow-up depth at Grab are the higher-signal extractions to take from this report.
For broader preparation context, the Grab interview process typically includes a recruiter screen, one or two technical phone screens, and a 4-5 round on-site loop covering coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral. Reports tagged on LeakCode show the round-by-round distribution and typical difficulty calibration. To browse questions filtered by round type and seniority, use the company hub linked above.
How To Practice This Type of Question
Solve similar problems on LeetCode under timed conditions (25-35 minutes per medium difficulty). The goal is pattern recognition: recognize the underlying technique (sliding window, two-pointer, BFS, memoized recursion, etc.) within 60-90 seconds of reading. Strong candidates verbalize their hypothesis out loud before coding, then iterate based on feedback. Weak candidates dive into implementation immediately, lose time on the wrong approach, and run out of time for follow-ups.
Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months. The exact wording of any given question may have been retired by the time you interview. Focus your prep on the pattern, not the specific problem. The patterns that appear in Grab reports consistently are the ones worth investing in; one-off niche problems are not.
During Your Grab Round
Apply the standard interview round template: clarify requirements (2-3 minutes), state your approach out loud and confirm direction with the interviewer (3-5 minutes), code with narration (15-25 minutes), test with concrete examples including edge cases (5 minutes), discuss optimization or trade-offs if time permits (5 minutes). This template is universally accepted across FAANG and adjacent companies; deviating from it produces weaker interviewer feedback signal.
The single most predictive failure mode in Grab reports tagged "no hire": not asking clarifying questions. Interviewers are explicitly trained to weight this. Strong candidates ask 3-5 clarifying questions even on problems that look obvious; weak candidates dive into code immediately. The clarifying-question check is often the first signal recorded in the interviewer's written notes.