Kotak Mahindra Bank Software Engineer interview experience

Posted Aug 2026 · Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

For the Bar Raiser third-party round on an SDE-2 interview at Kotak Mahindra Bank, I only had to tackle a single DSA style problem, but it came with a lot of push around the approach.

The question was to find the longest common prefix of the given strings.

I explained and implemented a binary search plus trie direction, trying to justify why that would be efficient. The interviewer kept pressing for more than just a working solution—there was an expectation of a clear, solid method and how it would scale.

It was a focused round, not broad across topics, but it felt intense because of the probing. I left with the sense that the solution path I suggested needed to be defended more carefully than I initially expected.

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