Purplle SDE Intern Interview Experience 2026 (Off-Campus)

This article is about my experience participating in the Purplle Tech Challenge 2026 and the interview process that followed.

Registration (15 May 2026)

I came across the challenge through a HackerEarth email and decided to register.

The challenge was open for students, freshers, and experienced professionals across multiple roles. During registration, if I remember correctly, they asked for the usual details- resume, CGPA, and some basic information.. Overall, the challenge saw around 38,000 registrations.

ROUND 1: Online Assessment (24 May 2026)

The assessment window was open from 22 May to 24 May. True to tradition, I attempted it a few hours before the deadline.

From what I remember, the assessment consisted of:

10 MCQs

2 DSA questions

1 SQL question

(I might be slightly off because it’s been a while.)

The DSA section felt manageable. The SQL question was a bit trickier, but overall I finished the assessment feeling reasonably confident, not confident enough to expect a shortlist though.

ROUND 2: Build Challenge (29 May — 4 June 2026)

On 29 May, I received the email saying I had qualified for the next round. Out of around 38,000 registrations, roughly 3,000 participants made it to the Build Challenge,

The next morning, I opened the problem statement properly. Except… some information and even the dataset were missing. I spent quite some time wondering whether I was missing something before a friend told me the dataset had finally been uploaded. I downloaded everything, opened it…and immediately got confused.

The challenge revolved around Computer Vision, which was completely outside my comfort zone. I had almost no prior experience in the domain. Thankfully, the instructions explicitly encouraged participants to experiment with AI tools and focus on building rather than already being experts.

The problem itself was genuinely interesting. Purplle already understands how users browse and purchase products on their app, but gathering similar behavioural data inside physical stores is much harder. We were given CCTV footage, transaction history, store layouts, and other datasets to build a solution around that problem.

Explaining the project itself would probably need an entirely separate article. You can check out my submission here:

[embed]GitHub - aditiiprasad/store-intelligence: Purplle Tech Challenge 2026 Purplle Tech Challenge 2026. Contribute to aditiiprasad/store-intelligence development by creating an account on…github.com

Later, Purplle extended the submission deadline by one day because they updated parts of the problem statement and dataset.

Interview Shortlisting (24 June 2026)

On 24 June, while I was at my internship at DRDO, I received a call from HR. She told me I’d been shortlisted for the technical interviews and would be my point of contact throughout the process. She asked for my availability, and I picked Friday, 26 June. At that point, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. There wasn’t much information online, barely any interview experiences, articles, or YouTube videos about Purplle’s interview process. So I did the only sensible thing, I revised my hackathon submission. And then… I got lazy.

ROUND 3: Technical Interview 1 (26 June 2026)

Looking back, going into the interview without many expectations probably worked in my favour. I wasn’t particularly nervous because I’d already convinced myself that I probably wouldn’t do amazingly anyway. That took away most of the pressure, and I ended up treating it more like a conversation than an interview. To make things slightly more interesting, my home internet stopped working that day. So I walked to a nearby bus stop where the mobile network was better and attended my interview from there. Yes. A bus stop. With traffic happily contributing to the background audio.

The interview lasted around 30 minutes. The interviewer, a Senior SDE at Purplle, introduced himself, I introduced myself, and then he asked me which programming language I was comfortable with, and this is what happened:

[embed]

we quickly moved on to discussing my resume. He asked about my internship at DRDO, my projects, and my hackathon submission. Most of the discussion revolved around engineering decisions: Why did I choose this technology? How would this scale? How would I build this for production? What trade-offs did I make? I was surprised by how much time we spent discussing the projects.

Towards the end, he asked if I had any questions. I asked for feedback. He said something along the lines of: “Everything looks fine. Every company looks for different things. At Purplle, we’re looking for people who can build and scale systems.”

I left the interview not expecting much. Still… Maybe expecting a little.

The weekend came. I could have prepared. I didn’t. Classic procrastination. Then, on Monday (29 June), I received the email for the second interview. I wasn’t quite sure whether to feel guilty for wasting the weekend or relieved that I somehow still had another shot.

ROUND 4: Final Technical Interview (30 June 2026)

This turned out to be one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve had. Once again, I had prepared… almost nothing. Since there hadn’t been any DSA in the first round, I confidently assumed there wouldn’t be any here either. That assumption lasted roughly five minutes.

The interviewer, an Engineering Manager who had been with Purplle since its early days, began with questions about my DRDO internship before casually asking me to design an LRU Cache. I definitely wasn’t expecting that. Fortunately, I managed to solve it. After that came an SQL question, which was comparatively straightforward. The rest of the interview shifted back to projects and technologies. We had a long discussion about the systems I’d built, the choices I’d made, and how different technologies actually work underneath.

One question that has stayed with me was about bcrypt. After seeing one of my login implementations, he asked me how bcrypt works internally. I answered with words like hashing and tried to explain the general idea… but I couldn’t really explain what happens under the hood. That was a useful reality check. Knowing how to use a technology and understanding how it actually works are two very different things.

Towards the end, we talked about Purplle’s engineering culture, how the company evolved over the years, and even how AI is changing software engineering. It genuinely felt less like an interview and more like a conversation with someone who had spent years building products. One thing I realised afterwards was how different this interview felt from most MNC interviews. Most of my preparation until then had revolved around DSA because that’s usually what companies evaluate heavily. Here, the discussion was much more centred around building software, making engineering decisions, and understanding systems. It reminded me that there’s a whole side of software engineering that doesn’t always show up on LeetCode.

I don’t know whether I performed well enough.

But I walked away having learned quite a bit.

The Result

That was the final interview. On 2 July, I messaged HR to ask if there were any updates.

A few hours later, she called me.

We discussed my availability, the internship stipend, the FTE conversion process, and the fact that the internship would be remote for the first six months. She also mentioned that they wanted me to join immediately.

A few days later, I received the onboarding email.

I’m grateful for the opportunity and everything I learned throughout the process.

If you’re participating in the next edition of the Purplle Tech Challenge, I hope this gives you a rough idea of what to expect.

Connect with me on Linked In and Github.

[embed]aditiiprasad - Overview One step at a time. ◡̈ - aditiiprasadgithub.com