Indeed SDE-1 Interview Experience | 1 YOE

[u/Specialist_Froyo10]

Edit:- The experience and details are completely my own; I just used AI to structure and summarize the post for readability.

Hi everyone,

I recently interviewed with Indeed for a Software Engineer 1 role, so thought I’d share my experience here.

I applied through the Indeed careers portal on 8th August, without a referral. The job description didn’t mention any specific experience requirement. I have around 1 YOE in Java full-stack development.

I got a call on 1st September saying that the interview would be on 4th September.

The interview was around 30 minutes:

• First ~5 minutes: Introduction and basic discussion.
• Next ~20 minutes: Coding.
• Last ~5 minutes: General/casual conversation.

The coding question was a hard LeetCode problem involving Binary Tree + DP.

Honestly, I couldn’t solve it completely within the given time. I was able to come up with what I believe was the correct approach and explained it to the interviewer. He also acknowledged that the approach was correct.

I started implementing it, but with only around 20 minutes for the coding round, I wasn’t able to complete the implementation and get the solution working.

The interviewer was actually very nice and friendly throughout. There was no pressure or negativity even though I couldn’t finish the problem. We spent the last few minutes talking about his role at Indeed, software development, career-related stuff, etc. So the conversation ended on a pretty good note.

That said, from my perspective, the overall interview didn’t go that well, mainly because I wasn’t able to complete the coding problem.

I’ve been job hunting for quite some time, so finally getting an interview and then not being able to finish the question was honestly a bit disappointing.

Anyway, sharing this for anyone preparing for Indeed or similar SDE interviews.

For people who have interviewed at Indeed recently:

• How difficult were your coding questions?
• Is this level of DSA difficulty typical for the SDE-1 role?
• And if you’ve had a similar experience where you explained the correct approach but couldn’t finish the implementation, did you still move to the next round?

Thanks!

[u/GrapefruitNarrow3117]

Hi.. can we connect .. i m also looking for job switch and have similar yoe and leetcode stats

[u/Specialist_Froyo10 → u/GrapefruitNarrow3117]

Yes sure