I recently interviewed for an SDE role at EPAM Systems, and overall the process was quite difficult and very technical. The interview process had multiple rounds focused heavily on problem-solving, DSA, core CS fundamentals, and practical coding ability. The coding rounds were tougher than I expected — not just standard LeetCode-style questions, but also follow-up optimizations, edge cases, and discussions around time and space complexity. The interviewers kept pushing deeper whenever I solved something quickly. One of the challenging parts was that they didn’t just want a working solution; they expected clean code, good communication, and strong reasoning throughout. I was asked to explain trade-offs, optimize approaches, and sometimes even redesign the solution midway based on new constraints

I gave this interview a few months back and they asked a couple of questions which were from DSA to then diving deep into explaining them the pseudocode did not have to run the complete code on a compiler but only explain the pseudocode. The interviewer also focused on the projects which I had done earlier along with the specialization subjects studied in the college academic year. Then I was cleared for the second round of interview which consisted a lot around cloud and DevOps asking more questions on AWS and its service. This interview also did revolve around AI engineering as I had that on my resume because of one internship. Soon after that I received the offer letter.