Rahul's Blog

CRED Interview Experience

July 20, 2021

Intro

CRED is an Indian unicorn fin-tech startup that give rewards for paying credit card bills. But it’s more of a lifestyle brand than being a fin-tech product. One needs to have a good credit-score to become a CRED member & enjoy benefits, which means it filters out the customers with low credit score. It’s a smart way to provide value experience to the customers.

How I landed the interview?

I created my profile on Instahyre and updated all the necessary details to stand out from the crowd. In just 2 days, I received a call from an HR at CRED about a frontend developer role & I decided to give it a try.

Interview Process

CRED conduct 3-5 interview rounds.

  • Tech Round 1: 90 minutes
  • Tech Round 2: 90 minutes
  • Tech Round 3: 90 minutes
  • Cultural Fit Round: 60 minutes
  • Salary Discussion: 30 minutes

Tech Round 1

I met an amazing developer at CRED during the interview. It started with a basic introduction & then we started talking about Work From Home, Coronavirus, & Monsoon, etc. Interviewer told me about the working culture, his journey till now and the ongoing projects in web-team at CRED. Then he asked me introduce myself with what I do, what I like and all. So I opened my bio and shared the screen to give him a better picture of myself. I told him about my work at Zolo, freelancing, animation, and open-source projects. We discussed about business models of CRED and Zolo. He asked me about why I want to switch and all. Then he gave me a moderate javascript problem. I read the problem, repeated what I understood so that we can be on the same page. I prepared the process in my mind and explained him with pseudo codes. Then I started live coding the problem. He gave me hints to make the code working and optimized. I completed the problem. Then we talked about why he joined CRED and how he made the decision to join CRED etc. It was an amazing experience overall. I met a nice developer.

Result

Cleared the round 1 & scheduled the round 2 for next week.

Tech Round 2

I cleared the round 1 and appeared for the round 2. I really liked the flexibility to schedule the interview as per my choice. I need to brush up my Javascript knowledge, so I took a week time before the round 2.

I again met an amazing developer at CRED during the interview. It started with a basic introduction & then he started talking about work and projects at CRED. Interviewer asked me about my expectation in terms of work. Then he asked me introduce myself with what I do, what I like and all. So I opened my bio and shared the screen to give him a better picture of myself. I told him about my work at Zolo, freelancing, animation, and open-source projects. He asked me about why I want to switch and all. Then he gave me a moderate machine coding problem. The task to develop a search box that gives suggestions on input. He gave me the API to fetch the suggestions. I asked him about the functionalities like debouncing, events and all to properly understand the requirements. He told me to develop it in vanilla javascript. When I completed the code, he started asking me the following questions:

  • Approach to attach the click event listeners on the suggestions? Event bubbling, event delegation? (✅)
  • Difference between defer, async scripts, their pros and cons. (✅)
  • Modular scripts, scopes, IIFE. (✅)
  • Loading of CSS files is synchronous or asynchronous? Does it blocks the HTML parsing? (❌)
  • Why react? How react works under the hood? (❌)
  • What is virtualDOM? Its advantage? (❌)
  • Why Nextjs? Dynamic routes in file based routing? Advantages of Nextjs over React? Can we switch to client side rendering or pre-rendering in Nextjs? (❌)
  • React states, Layout, Scalability. (✅)

Result

Cleared the round 2 & scheduled the round 3 for next week.

Tech Round 3

I cleared the round 1, 2 and appeared for the round 3. I really liked the flexibility to schedule the interview as per my choice. I need to brush up my Javascript & React knowledge, so I took a week time before the round 3.

I again met an amazing developer at CRED during the interview. It started with a basic introduction & then he started talking about work and projects at CRED. Interviewer asked me about my expectation in terms of work. Then he asked me introduce myself with what I do, what I like and all. So I opened my bio and shared the screen to give him a better picture of myself. I told him about my work at Zolo, freelancing, animation, and open-source projects. He asked me about why I want to switch and all.

Then the actual interview started with a basic machine coding problem in React. The task was to develop a form based web application with input fields like PAN Number, & Aadhar Number etc. He wanted to test React skills on how I maintain the the states of the input fields. Then he started questioning about optimization aspect of the web-app when there are 10+ input fields.

Result

Cleared the round 3 & scheduled the cultural fit round.

Cultural Fit Round

I cleared the round 1, 2, 3 and appeared for the cultural fit round. I really liked the flexibility to schedule the interview as per my choice.

Tech Lead at CRED took this round. The interview started with the basic introduction and then started briefing me about the feedback in all 3 tech rounds. He told me that I need to grow my Javascript skills, which totally made sense to me.

Result

Cleared the round and got the offer letter after the salary discussion round.

Resources

Written by Rahul Jain         
I write code like I make sandwich