What Is the Ola Interview Process Like? (Round by Round)

Candidates report three to five rounds for a software engineer role at Ola, plus a short HR call. Experienced candidates report a machine coding round, one to three live data structures rounds, a design round, and a hiring manager round. Campus candidates report a shorter path that starts with a 90 minute online coding test. No single report describes every stage listed below. Ola runs several businesses, including ride hailing, Ola Maps, Krutrim and Ola Electric, so the rounds differ by team and by level. Expect about two to four weeks from the first contact to a decision, which is typical for companies of this size rather than a wait Ola publishes.

Quick Overview

Stage 1: Online Coding Test

Campus candidates report a 90 minute test with three problems at easy to medium difficulty. All three are mandatory. The reported topics are arrays, strings and dynamic programming. Several experienced candidates report no written test at all, and start instead with a live coding round. Reports name HackerRank CodePair for the live coding rounds. If a written test is new to you, read what an online technical assessment is.

Stage 2: Machine Coding Round

Experienced candidates report a machine coding round, which is a session where you build a small working program from a written requirement. Reports describe roughly one to two hours, and one report gives about an hour. Reported problems include a publish and subscribe system with topics and subscriber groups, a bowling game written with object oriented design, and an LRU cache built to a stated time cost. Grading is on working code, class structure, and how easily a new requirement can be added. This round is covered in detail in the Ola system design answer.

Stage 3: Data Structures Rounds

Candidates report one to three live coding rounds of 40 to 60 minutes each. Reported problems include trapping rain water, the minimum time to burn a binary tree from a given node, minimum cost to join ropes, and product of array except self. Other reports name merging sorted arrays, next permutation, an LFU cache, and the smallest window in one string that contains every character of another. Interviewers ask for the time and space cost of each solution. One report describes being asked to write the solution in Java.

Stage 4: System Design Round

Candidates report a design discussion, and one report describes a round longer than 90 minutes. Reported questions include designing a file uploader service similar to Dropbox, designing and implementing an LRU cache, and redesigning in-app support so a user finds help by search. One report describes sketching a distributed database that runs in either a consistent or an available mode. Interviewers also ask about sharding, load balancer algorithms, and the choice between consistency and availability. One report describes a detailed resume discussion inside the same round.

Stage 5: Hiring Manager Round

Reported topics include circuit breakers, schedulers, load balancing, and scaling a database and a cache. A circuit breaker is a part that stops calls to a failing service for a set period. Candidates also report questions on horizontal versus vertical scaling and on choosing SQL or NoSQL. Expect a long discussion of your current project, with diagrams of each module. Motivation questions appear here as well, so prepare why you want to work at Ola.

Stage 6: HR Round

One report describes about 20 minutes. Questions cover your background, your projects, your reason for leaving your current employer, and your notice period. Reports also describe questions about why you want to join a startup rather than a larger company.

How the Campus Path Differs

Campus candidates report a shorter process. Reports describe the online test, one or two technical rounds on Zoom, and a short HR round. The machine coding round is usually absent for freshers, and the technical rounds stay on data structures and projects. One report describes results announced by email the next day.

Timeline and Decision

About two to four weeks from the first contact to a decision is typical for companies of this size. Gaps between rounds are common, and scheduling is often slow. Ola does not publish a wait for each stage, so treat any figure as a guide rather than a promise. The waits after each stage are covered in how long it takes to hear back after an Ola interview.

Questions to Ask Them

Every round ends with time for your questions. Use that time, because a specific question also proves you researched the company. Useful questions here: which business the team belongs to, how the team measures map data quality or dispatch accuracy, how on call works, and what the team released most recently. Ask how the team handles peak demand, since that is the daily engineering problem in ride hailing.

How to Prepare

• Practice the coding patterns first. Grokking the Coding Interview covers the sliding window, heap and dynamic programming problems these rounds repeat.
• Build one program end to end under a timer. Write a publish and subscribe system or a bowling game scorer in 90 minutes, then add a new requirement to it.
• Study the design building blocks. Grokking the System Design Interview covers the queues, caches and indexes the design round expects.
• Prepare your current project in depth. The hiring manager round asks about one project in detail, including the modules you did not build yourself.