EPAM Interview Experience 2026: Rounds and Questions

The role: EPAM AI-Native Software Engineering Intern

It's an intern-plus-full-time offer. You finish a mandatory self-study learning path before joining, then a five-month training internship, and after completing it successfully you move into a full-time engineering role. Onboarding can be at any of EPAM's India offices in Hyderabad, Coimbatore or Chennai, so you need to be flexible about location.

The 'AI-native' part is what makes it different. EPAM describes the program as training engineers who design, delegate to and review AI agents in real delivery work - not just using a coding assistant for autocomplete - while still building strong fundamentals. The job description asks for solid basics in one language (Java, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript or C#), OOP and data structures, Git and the command line, first-principles thinking and good written communication. Exposure to an LLM API, prompt engineering basics and a GitHub profile with personal projects are nice to have.

EPAM eligibility criteria (2027 batch)

To sit the drive you needed all of these:

• Degree: B.E. / B.Tech in CSE, IT or a related stream, or MCA.
• Graduation: at least 70% (or equivalent CGPA).
• 10th and 12th: at least 60% in both.
• No active backlogs.
• No gap between 10th and 12th, and at most 12 months between 12th and graduation.

EPAM hiring process: the official rounds

At Chitkara, placements run through an app called Superset. Our placement coordinator head uploads each company's details there - the job description, eligibility and schedule - and results are published there too.

The job description listed six stages:

• Online assessment (MCQs and coding)
• Pre-placement talk (PPT)
• In-person coding test
• Group discussion (GD)
• Technical interview
• Managerial and final round

Round 1: EPAM coding round on paper (LRU cache)

The coding test was on paper, and the answers were descriptive: you write the code and explain your approach, not just produce output. My question was to implement an LRU (least recently used) cache.

The standard approach is a hash map plus a doubly linked list. The map finds a key's node in O(1). The list keeps nodes in order of use, most recent at the front. On get, move the node to the front. On put, insert at the front, and if the cache is over capacity, remove the node at the back - the least recently used one. Both operations stay O(1).

Logic over syntax

I made syntax mistakes on paper, but my logic was correct, and I was selected for the next round. There's no compiler on paper, and the evaluators are clearly reading for the approach. If you can explain why your solution works and what it costs in time and space, a missing semicolon won't sink you.

Round 2: EPAM group discussion (GD) topic

The GD wasn't a current-affairs topic. It was a problem-solving scenario: you're on the bank of a river full of crocodiles, and a lion and a tiger are behind you at some distance. How do you escape?

Before the discussion started, I asked a lot of cross-questions to pin down the problem:

• Do we have any weapon with us?
• How far away are the lion and the tiger?
• Where are we - deep in a jungle or forest, or near a village?
• Do we have a mobile phone?

What the EPAM GD is really testing

Those questions were the point. The panel watches how you approach an open problem: whether you clarify the constraints before jumping to an answer, and whether you work through the cases the way you'd work through test cases for code. Mostly they're checking communication and problem solving. My spoken English is good and I was confident, and I was selected for the interview.

Round 3: EPAM technical interview questions

I hadn't slept the whole night before, or that whole day. The interview lasted 50 minutes to an hour, and the interviewer began by asking how I was feeling. He talked to me normally, like a friend, and that took my nervousness away. I haven't met another interviewer like him, and I'm grateful to him for it.

Then it went deep. What he asked about:

• My project CargoNepal, in depth: the project structure, what it is, why I built it and what I used to build it.
• A DSA question: reverse each word of a string while keeping the words in the same order.
• My hackathon experience: the tech stack, my role, and where the idea came from.
• Nepal vs India - why I came to India to study engineering.

DSA question: reverse each word in a string

For example, 'hello world' becomes 'olleh dlrow'. Split the string on spaces, reverse the characters of each word, and join the words back in the same order. It's O(n) time. Worth raising with the interviewer: what happens with multiple spaces between words, or leading and trailing spaces. To do it in place, walk the string with two pointers per word and swap characters inward.

The result: placed on 9 August 2026

Overall I would call the interview medium difficulty, and I did well in it. Partway through, the interviewer hinted indirectly that I was placed, and at the end he gave me his name and number, which surprised me.

We found out the same day, 9 August 2026, that we were placed. The official result came on Superset on 10 August.

As a Nepali citizen: the Aadhaar card issue

After selection, there was a document issue. They asked for an Aadhaar card - India's national ID - and as a Nepali citizen I didn't have one. At first they said this drive wasn't for Nepali students. After they checked with the authorities, they told me I was good to go, and later they confirmed my acceptance in a room with all the placed students.

So yes, a Nepali student can be placed at EPAM through campus placement - I was. The eligibility criteria didn't mention nationality at all. If you're a Nepali student in India, raise your nationality with your placement cell before the drive, so the company can confirm it early instead of after you've been selected.

Tips to crack the EPAM interview

• Prepare well. Most of the important questions are the frequently repeated ones - LRU cache and string manipulation are classics - so cover those first.
• Communication and confidence matter in every round, not just the GD.
• Problem solving and leadership should come through naturally in how you answer, not as claims you make.
• Don't fake anything. If it's on your resume, expect to be asked about it in depth.
• Keep your resume simple, but speak about it like a professional and go deeper than what is written.
• Know what you'd do differently in production. If you stored an auth token in localStorage, say that for a production build you'd use HttpOnly cookies, which JavaScript can't read, so an XSS bug can't steal the token. It isn't on your resume, but it shows you know more than what's written there, and it leaves the best impression.
• Check the eligibility criteria early. Your 10th, 12th and graduation scores decide whether you can sit the drive at all.