Schrodinger interview experience Real time questions & tips from candidates to crack your interview

Backend Developer

Schrodinger

2 rounds | 3 Coding problems

Deepak Narang

Experienced | Mar 2026

Rejected

Interview preparation journey

Journey

A recruiter from Schrödinger, Inc. reached out to me on LinkedIn after noticing my experience and skills in backend development. She asked me to email my resume, and 2–3 days later, I received a call informing me that my resume had been shortlisted and that they would be proceeding with further interview rounds.

Application story

I was approached by a recruiter who came across my profile on LinkedIn. (I have carefully curated my LinkedIn profile to highlight my technical skills, relevant work experience, and key achievements so that it remains visible in recruiter searches.) The recruiter reached out to check my interest in the opportunity and requested my resume. Upon confirming my interest, I shared my updated resume via email. After 2–3 days, she contacted me again to inform me that my profile had been shortlisted. During the call, she explained the overall interview process, mentioning that there would be approximately 4–5 rounds in total, with the final round scheduled as an on-site interview at the Hyderabad office.

Why selected/rejected for the role?

I was well prepared for the system design rounds, as my day-to-day responsibilities in my current organization involve extensively designing and developing scalable systems. However, my preparation for data structures and algorithms was not as thorough at that time. As a result, I was unable to fully solve the dynamic programming problem given by the interviewer, and a few test cases did not pass.

Preparation

Duration: 1 month

Topics: Dynamic Programming, System Design, OOPs, Database Transactions, Multithreading

Tip

Tip 1: Prepare dynamic programming well.

Tip 2: Prepare database isolation levels and locking concepts well (optimistic locking, pessimistic locking, etc.), and understand which to use in real-world use cases.

Tip 3: If you are interviewing for SDE-2 or above, prepare system design concepts well, such as trade-offs between NoSQL and SQL, Kafka vs. RabbitMQ, etc.

Application process

Where: Linkedin

Eligibility: No, only prior work experience is required (preferably in Java and Spring Boot). (Salary Package: 30-40 LPA)

Resume tip

Tip 1: Mention your projects on your resume in bullet points and quantify their impact with numbers (e.g., optimized system performance by 40%).

Tip 2: Mention only those skills you are confident in.

Interview rounds

Round

Medium

Video Call

Duration60 minutes

Interview date30 Oct 2025

Coding problem2

It was divided into two parts:

Introduction and project discussion.
In Part 2, the interviewer asked some questions from their side.

1. Project Discussion

Discussion of projects: The interviewer wanted to understand the tech stack I had used and the scale of the projects I had worked on. He then cross-questioned me on the tech stack and the design choices in the projects.

Cross Questions:
Why did I choose MongoDB in one project and PostgreSQL in another?
Why did I choose RabbitMQ in one project instead of Kafka or Amazon SQS?

Problem approach

Tip 1: Be structured and prepared with system design concepts and trade-offs.

Tip 2: You should thoroughly understand every project mentioned in your resume.

2. Database Concepts

In the second half of the interview, the interviewer asked the following questions:

What are the various isolation levels in databases?
For banking transactions, would you use optimistic locking or pessimistic locking, and why?
What is a deadlock? Can you give a real-life example of a deadlock?
What does the @Transactional annotation do?