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Unacademy’s fresher loop is a 4-5 stage process where coding rounds stay close to standard DSA, but a dedicated project deep-dive and a discussion-style managerial round carry real weight alongside the technical bar.
Interview experience
Unacademy interview experiences covering Online Assessment, Technical Interview(s), System design / SQL round (some loops), Managerial round, +1 more. Round-wise notes, common questions, and what candidates report clears each stage.
HR interview questions
Unacademy HR interview questions with sample answer frameworks - motivation, relocation, STAR stories, and culture-fit prompts.
| Round | Duration | What it tests |
|---|---|---|
| Online Assessment | ~90 min | 2 coding problems (strings/arrays, e.g. palindrome or frequency-counting patterns) |
| Technical Interview(s) | 45 min each | DSA (incl. graphs), plus a detailed project deep-dive |
| System design / SQL round (some loops) | 45 min | Lightweight system design, SQL, data-structure fundamentals |
| Managerial round | 45 min | Discussion-style behavioral - ownership, ambiguity |
| HR round | 30 min | Offer, logistics, general fit |
These answers are compiled from public candidate reports and prep guides, not from an official Unacademy notice, and drives differ. Hiring is irregular, so confirm the role is live, and treat the instruction screen of your own test as the final word.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| How many questions and how long? | Older candidate reports describe about 90 minutes with 2 coding problems, string and array heavy, when an OA is used. No 2024-2025 report we read confirms the format. |
| Is there always an OA? | No. The GfG SDE report updated July 2025 (interview around mid-2024) starts with a phone screen on previous work and goes straight to live rounds. |
| Does it have negative marking? | No public report mentions any. It is a coding test with no MCQ section described. |
| Is there a sectional cutoff? | No. With only 2 coding problems there are no sections. |
| How much is the cutoff? | Not published. Some candidate reports cite 7.0 CGPA or 70% throughout, CS or IT, with no live backlogs; we found no recent source confirming it. |
| Which platform is it on? | Not reliably named in public reports; go by your invite mail. |
| What problems come up? | Longest palindromic substring and counting the occurrences of every element in a list are the most reported, in the OA or the first live round. |
These topics come from GfG Unacademy interview experiences and the round notes on this page. They show the level and style, not a fixed list.
| Role | Reported questions and topics |
|---|---|
| SDE (experienced or off-campus) | Phone screen on previous work; round 1: longest palindromic substring and element counts; round 2: a 45-minute project deep dive; round 3: DSA including Number of Islands with DFS; round 4: managerial and behavioural. |
| SDE (fresher / campus) | A coding OA (about 90 minutes in older reports), DSA rounds with graphs, and on some loops a system design and SQL round (top courses by enrolment, binary trees, hash maps, heaps). |
| Educator intern | No coding test. Record a video with a course structure or a 200-hour study plan plus a short lecture on a simple concept, then submit the application form. |
Asked across every role: a detailed walk through your project or teaching plan, and how you handle a project being shelved or requirements changing.
Around 90 minutes with 2 coding problems, string/array-heavy. Reported prompts include longest palindromic substring and counting the occurrences of every element in a list - pattern-recognition problems more than exotic ones.
Common questions
A DSA round (including graph problems) paired with - or followed by - a dedicated project-discussion segment that can run up to 45 minutes on its own. Some loops add a further round on system design, SQL, and core data structures.
Common questions
Round-by-round narratives are on the Unacademy interview experience page.
Described by candidates as discussion-oriented rather than a rapid Q&A session - the interviewer wants to see how you think and communicate, not just tick boxes on behavioral prompts.
Common questions
A closing conversation on logistics, offer details, and general fit once the technical and managerial bars are cleared.
Common questions
Sample answer frameworks for each of these are on the Unacademy HR interview questions page.
Unacademy hires engineers and educators through completely different processes. Educator roles, including the Educator internship, are selected on recorded demos: a course structure or study plan and a short lecture. There is no DSA test.
SDE hiring runs a coding OA or phone screen, DSA rounds, a long project deep dive, sometimes system design and SQL, then managerial and HR rounds. This page covers SDE hiring. If you are applying to teach, prepare a clear demo lecture rather than coding problems.
Unlike a pure SaaS or e-commerce company, Unacademy’s core product depends on a marketplace of educators (creators) producing live and recorded content - so domain questions sometimes probe how you’d think about content delivery at scale, live-class infrastructure, or learner engagement, rather than a generic CRUD system. It’s also worth knowing the company cut jobs in multiple rounds between 2022 and mid-2024 (including about 250 in mid-2024); Storyboard18 (May 2025) counts more than 1,300 layoffs since 2022, while other tallies run near 2,000. In May 2025 co-founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal stepped down, co-founder Sumit Jain took charge, and the company shifted toward physical learning centres and launched the AirLearn language app. The interview process itself hasn’t changed, but it’s reasonable to ask about team stability directly.
The standard interview solution is expand-around-centre: for each of the 2n-1 possible centres (n single characters and n-1 gaps between characters), expand outwards while the left and right characters match, and track the longest span seen. That runs in O(n^2) time and O(1) extra space, which is what Unacademy interviewers usually accept. The dynamic-programming table version is also O(n^2) time but needs O(n^2) space, so it is strictly worse. If asked for optimal, mention Manacher’s algorithm, which transforms the string with separators and reuses previously computed palindrome radii to get O(n) time.
Use a hash map from element to count: iterate the list once, and for each item increment its entry (defaulting to zero). That is O(n) time and O(k) space where k is the number of distinct values, and it beats the naive nested-loop count which is O(n^2). In Python this is collections.Counter(lst); in Java it is a HashMap with merge(x, 1, Integer::sum). If the values are small bounded integers, an array of size max+1 used as a direct-index counter is faster still because it avoids hashing entirely.
BFS explores level by level using a queue, so on an unweighted graph the first time it reaches a node it has found the shortest path in number of edges. DFS goes as deep as possible using a stack or recursion, which makes it natural for cycle detection, topological sort, and connected-component labelling. Both are O(V+E) time on an adjacency list; BFS space is proportional to the width of the frontier while DFS space is proportional to the recursion depth. For a shortest-hop question pick BFS, for a reachability or ordering question pick DFS.
Run DFS and keep three states per node: unvisited, in-recursion-stack, and fully processed. If DFS reaches a node that is currently in the recursion stack, you have found a back edge and therefore a cycle. This is O(V+E) time and O(V) space. The alternative is Kahn’s algorithm for topological sort: repeatedly remove nodes with in-degree zero, and if fewer than V nodes come out, the leftover nodes form a cycle. Note that the simple visited-set trick used for undirected graphs is not sufficient here, because a cross edge to an already-visited node is not a cycle in a directed graph.
A hash map applies a hash function to the key to compute a bucket index, so the expected number of keys per bucket stays small as long as the load factor is kept low (Java’s HashMap resizes at 0.75). Average get and put are therefore O(1). Degradation happens when many keys collide into one bucket - with a poor hash or adversarial keys, lookup becomes O(n) in the worst case for a plain chained implementation. Java 8 and later mitigates this by converting a bucket’s linked list into a balanced tree once it exceeds eight entries, bounding the worst case at O(log n).
Assuming an enrolments table with a course_id column, the query is SELECT course_id, COUNT(*) AS total FROM enrolments GROUP BY course_id ORDER BY total DESC LIMIT 3;. The GROUP BY collapses rows per course, COUNT() gives the enrolment count, and ORDER BY with LIMIT takes the top three. Note you cannot put the aggregate condition in WHERE - filters on COUNT() must go in HAVING, because WHERE is evaluated before grouping. On SQL Server the equivalent is SELECT TOP 3 instead of LIMIT.
A binary min-heap gives you the minimum in O(1) by reading the root, with O(log n) insert and O(log n) extract-min, but it has no useful ordering beyond the root - searching for an arbitrary value is O(n). A balanced BST gives O(log n) search, insert, delete, and in-order traversal in sorted order, but reading the minimum still costs O(log n) as you walk left. So for a top-k or streaming-minimum problem use a heap; for range queries or ordered iteration use a BST. Heaps also have better constants because they live in a contiguous array with no pointer chasing.
Attendance writes arrive in a heavy, append-only burst when a live class starts, and each record is small and independent - that suits a wide-column or document store that partitions by class ID and scales writes horizontally. A relational database is the better choice when you need multi-row transactions and joins, for example reconciling subscriptions against payments where correctness matters more than write throughput. In practice you often use both: the relational store as the source of truth for billing and enrolment, and a NoSQL store or event log for high-volume telemetry. Say the trade-off out loud in the round - interviewers are grading the reasoning, not the label.
Split the problem: learner attempt rows are append-heavy and need ACID so a submit is never counted twice - relational Postgres or MySQL with a unique constraint on (user_id, quiz_id, attempt_no) is the usual answer in EM rounds. Leaderboards and aggregate stats can lag behind on a read replica or cache because users tolerate seconds of delay on rank display. Say explicitly which path is CP versus AP; LeetCode Discuss reports this exact CAP/ACID follow-up after schema questions.
Educator hiring is assignment-led: recorded demo lessons, subject plans, and communication - not a 90-minute DSA OA. Software-engineer loops expect coding, project depth, and sometimes SQL or design. If your resume is CS-heavy, confirm the requisition says SDE or backend; do not prepare graphs for an educator role or vice versa.
Treat it as a judgement conversation, not a trick question. Acknowledge sunk cost, name reusable code or data, ask what learner or revenue problem the pivot targets, and describe how you would validate the new direction in one sprint. Unacademy has publicly shifted strategy and headcount; interviewers use this prompt to see whether you adapt without blaming the team.
Public 2025 hiring posts for backend freshers in Bengaluru cite Python or Golang, onsite five days, and immediate joiners preferred. Your OA may still be language-agnostic; confirm stack with the recruiter once you clear the screen.
No public report mentions negative marking. When Unacademy runs an online assessment, older candidate reports describe a short coding test - about 90 minutes with 2 string or array problems - scored on test cases, with no MCQ section described. The most recent GfG SDE report (interview around mid-2024) had no OA at all.
No - reports conflict. Some loops start with a 90-minute coding OA, but a 2024-era GfG report describes a phone screen followed directly by live interviews, where the same longest palindromic substring and element-count problems were asked in round 1. Check your invite mail.
Unacademy’s SDE loop typically runs 4-5 stages: 1. Online Assessment (~90 min) - 2 coding problems (candidates report classics like longest palindromic substring and counting occurrences of each element). 2. Technical Interview - DSA problems including graph questions, plus a detailed project-discussion round. 3. A further technical round some candidates report as System Design, Algorithms, Data Structures, and SQL combined - up to 5 coding problems across the loop. 4. Managerial round - primarily behavioral, discussion-style rather than Q&A. 5. HR round - offer and logistics. Total timeline is roughly 3-4 weeks.
Coding rounds lean on strings, arrays, and graphs - longest palindromic substring, counting element occurrences, and graph traversal problems are commonly reported. A separate round goes deep on a resume project (up to 45 minutes). Some loops add SQL and binary tree/hashmap/heap questions. The managerial round is explicitly discussion-oriented rather than rapid-fire Q&A, and covers ownership and how you handle ambiguity in a fast-changing edtech product.
Most reports describe 4-5 touchpoints: an online assessment, one or two DSA/project-focused technical rounds, sometimes a dedicated system-design-plus-SQL round, a managerial/behavioral round, and a closing HR round. The exact count varies by team and hiring cycle - some drives compress stages.
Practice string and array problems (palindrome and frequency-counting patterns come up specifically) plus graph traversal for the technical rounds. Prepare one project you can discuss for a full 45 minutes - stack choices, trade-offs, what broke. Revise basic SQL and be ready for a lightweight system-design prompt. For the managerial round, prepare stories on working through a deprioritized project or a fast pivot, since Unacademy’s content/creator business has gone through real strategy shifts.
Yes, mainly in hiring volume - Unacademy cut jobs in several rounds of layoffs between 2022 and mid-2024 as post-pandemic demand for online learning cooled, including a cut of about 250 in mid-2024. Tallies vary: Storyboard18 (May 2025) puts the total at more than 1,300 since 2022, and other counts run near 2,000. In May 2025 co-founder Gaurav Munjal stepped down as CEO and co-founder Sumit Jain took over. This hasn’t changed the interview format, but it’s a reasonable thing to ask about directly - which team you’d join and how stable it currently is - rather than assuming steady growth-stage hiring.
Beyond coding, expect a genuine project deep-dive (not a quick summary) and, on some loops, a lightweight system-design or SQL segment. Interviewers weigh how clearly you explain trade-offs and handle follow-up probing over whether you memorized a pattern.
Good fit: You already finish two medium DSA problems in 90 minutes, you can draw a live-class box diagram, and you checked that a SWE role is actually open.
Harder path: You are prepping Unacademy because a 2021 YouTube video said ₹18 LPA and you have not opened Careers this month. Or you are an Educator candidate grinding graphs.
Use this as a default four-week loop before a Unacademy drive. Adjust to your invite timeline.
10-day crash version: Days 1-4 timed DSA, days 5-7 resume projects + CS fundamentals, days 8-9 mock interviews out loud, day 10 HR STAR stories on the HR page.
Candidate-reported fresher/early-career packages for Unacademy often cite ₹12-18 LPA cited for SWE (verify letter; funding cycles moved numbers). Treat forum numbers as ranges, not guarantees - confirm the written offer letter for your team and location.
Interview process details and sample questions on this site are editorially organized from public candidate reports and hiring write-ups, with round structure, prep notes, and company-specific framing added by our team. For round-by-round stories, see the Unacademy interview experience page. For OA papers and coding drills, use Unacademy on placementpapers.app. OA quick answers and role-wise questions draw on GfG Unacademy interview experiences, including the SDE interview report (updated July 2025) and the Educator internship 2023 report; company-structure facts draw on Storyboard18 (May 2025) on Gaurav Munjal’s exit and layoff totals.
