Razorpay is a Bengaluru payments company whose gateway, payouts and banking products serve Indian businesses. Its interviews, as candidates describe them, are practical: a long machine coding round on your own machine, low-level design, and system design for payment flows. This page covers what Razorpay builds and who it hires, the process candidates commonly report, the technical depth the teams care about, representative problem types, what interviewers score, and a three-week prep plan.
What Razorpay builds and who it hires
Razorpay's engineers build the payment gateway, payment links and subscriptions, the RazorpayX business banking and payouts products, and the infrastructure that absorbs spikes such as cricket-season traffic. Engineers have described in public talks a multi-year move from a PHP monolith to Go microservices, using dual writes and the transactional outbox pattern to keep financial data consistent.
- SDE-1 and SDE-2: back-end services in Go, plus legacy PHP.
- Senior and lead engineers: loops with longer design rounds.
- Front-end engineers: checkout and dashboards.
- Infrastructure engineers: reliability and scale.
What the process tends to look like
| Stage | What happens | How to prepare |
|---|---|---|
| Recruiter call or referral | Role, level (SDE-1, SDE-2 or SDE-3), team and timeline | Know the product, the team and your own résumé in detail |
| Machine coding | About two hours on your own IDE with screen sharing | Build in-memory systems with clean modules and tests |
| LLD and implementation discussion | Design talk, coding and a review of what you built | Explain extension points and trade-offs |
| System design (senior roles) | HLD for a payment or notification system | Idempotency, retries, ledgers and outbox |
| Hiring manager | A deep dive into your current project | Know every decision in your recent work |
Processes differ by team, level and office and change over time, so treat this as the common shape candidates report and confirm the specifics with your recruiter.
Practical coding, LLD and payment systems
Practical, not puzzle-first. Reported machine coding prompts include an in-memory publish-subscribe queue, an expense splitter, a rating system, a survey service and an in-memory SQL engine. Interviewers check that every functional requirement works and, for senior roles, that the code is modular and extensible.
From monolith to services. Razorpay's public account of leaving its PHP monolith makes good preparation. Know why dual writes are risky, how the outbox pattern publishes events reliably, and how to migrate without downtime.
Payment correctness. Expect questions where a retry must never charge twice: idempotency keys, state machines for payment status, webhooks that may arrive twice and reconciliation.
Representative problem types
These are the kinds of problems candidates describe, not a leaked question list. Practice the category, not the exact question.
- Build an in-memory pub-sub queue with multiple consumers.
- Build an in-memory key-value or SQL-like store with indexes.
- Design an idempotent payments API.
- Design a webhook delivery system with retries.
- Design a notification service for traffic spikes.
- Implement a rating system with aggregation.
- Medium DSA problems on hash maps and heaps.
What interviewers score
- Working code: a solution that runs, handles edge cases and is readable by the next engineer.
- Practical judgment: the trade-offs you name and the simplest design that meets the requirement.
- Product sense: understanding who the user is and what failure looks like for them.
- Ownership: examples where you shipped, measured and fixed things yourself.
The behavioral side
Technical rounds decide most outcomes, but every Razorpay loop also asks about how you work. Prepare a short story for each of these, with a result and what you learned:
- Something you shipped end to end. Cover the user problem, your decisions, what you measured and what you would change.
- A disagreement with a teammate. Show how you made the decision on evidence and kept the relationship.
- Why this company? Connect its product and engineering problems to the work you want to do next.
Structures and sample answers for the common questions are in our software engineer behavioral answers guide.
A three-week prep plan
- Week 1: practical coding: build small features against an API, parse and transform data, and write tests, in the language you will interview in.
- Week 2: system design for the company's domain, plus two behavioral stories about shipping and fixing something under pressure.
- Week 3: timed mixed problems, a mock interview every other day, and research into the product and its engineering blog.
For practice lists, use LeetCode company-tagged questions, the Striver A2Z sheet or the Love Babbar 450 sheet, and if your drive starts with a test, read our guide to new-grad online assessments.
Where CoPilot Interview fits
Most of a Razorpay loop is spoken: you explain an approach, defend a trade-off and talk through your past work. CoPilot Interview is an AI interview assistant whose free AI mock interview builds technical and behavioral questions from your résumé and the job description, reads them aloud and scores each spoken answer out of ten, so you can rehearse the explanation as well as the code. The free plan gives 15 minutes a day of live help in sessions of up to 15 minutes, with AI mock interviews included. Online assessments and many coding rounds forbid outside help, so practice beforehand and follow your employer's rules on the day.
Disclosure: CoPilot Interview is our product, so weigh what we say about it accordingly.
Frequently asked questions
What programming language should I use in a Razorpay interview?
Go is common in Razorpay's newer services, but candidates report choosing their own language in machine coding; Java and Go are both safe choices.
Does Razorpay send an online assessment?
Experienced candidates mostly describe a recruiter call followed by machine coding rather than a separate online assessment; campus hiring may include a test. Ask your recruiter.
Can I use my own IDE in the Razorpay machine coding round?
Several candidates report doing so: a virtual round of about two hours in their local IDE while sharing their screen with the interviewer. Set up a clean project template, a build tool and a quick test runner beforehand, and confirm the format in your invitation.
How should I prepare for Razorpay coding questions?
Practice practical problems under time limits, build small features against an API in your interview language, and prepare one system design in Razorpay's domain. Explain every solution out loud, because follow-up questions about trade-offs matter as much as the first answer.
Can I use AI tools in a Razorpay interview?
Only if the instructions you receive say so. Online assessments and live coding rounds generally forbid outside help, and some companies now state their AI policy in the invitation. Use AI to practice beforehand, and follow your employer's rules.
Practice this interview before the real one
The AI mock interview builds questions from your resume and the job description, reads them aloud and scores each spoken answer out of 10. Included on the free plan.
Start a mock interview