Flipkart · Senior Business Analyst
Bengaluru · Feb 2024 · 2 views
✓ Offer acceptedTotal process: 23 days
4 rounds: →→→
This experience is over 18 months old. Interview processes change — use it for general patterns, not specifics.
I have 5 years of experience working at pharma company before applying to Flipkart. I applied for the Senior Business Analyst role in the Supply Chain Analytics team, based in Bengaluru.
I was referred by a Flipkart Data Engineer on January 15th. The HR team responded on January 22nd. Before the rounds began, we discussed my current CTC and experience; I had a 30-day notice period at my previous company.
Format: Video
Duration: ~1 hour
Interviewer: Analytics Lead
The round opened with "Tell me about yourself" and covered a lot of ground across multiple tools and languages.
Database design: They asked me to design a database (Exact Tables & Columns) for a restaurant. They were testing for how you think about normalization, what metrics can you derive from the columns, what column and tables are important - which of these can be derived
Excel & aggregation: I was given a dataset with three aggregation-related questions to solve using pivot tables and Excel functions — SUMIF, AVERAGEIF, and MAXIF.
SQL: I then had to answer the same questions in SQL using GROUP BY, CASE WHEN, and aggregations. There were follow-ups on CTEs and JOINs.
VLOOKUP & XLOOKUP: Questions on lookup functions.
Python: I had to replicate everything I'd done in SQL using Python — iloc functions and Pandas. The interviewer also asked me to optimize the code for faster execution, which was the most demanding part of the round.
Verdict: Cleared
Format: Video
Duration: ~1 hour
Interviewer: Analytics Manager
Scheduled: February 28th (I called HR at end-of-day after Round 1 to push scheduling)
The round began with "Tell me about yourself" and moved into mental aptitude and a deep case study.
Mental aptitude questions: Maths problems including probability (a coin-flipping scenario) and a geometry question — "What is the angle between the two hands of a clock?" — where the answer needed to account for the hour hand's continuous movement, not just its position on the hour.
Case study — RCA: The main challenge was a Root Cause Analysis: "This February's sales are 20% lower than February last year. What are the possible reasons why?" We spent about 40 minutes building and debating hypotheses across roughly 20–25 factors.
Where I got stuck: The RCA was intensely grilling. Building that many hypotheses across different factors was difficult, especially coming from a pharma background and now moving into e-commerce. I didn't have the domain intuition to quickly identify all the levers.
Verdict: Cleared
Format: Video
Duration: ~1 hour
Interviewer: Senior Analytics Manager
Scheduled: February 4th (I called HR after Round 2 to schedule)
Again, "Tell me about yourself" opened the round.
Mental aptitude: Maths questions, including the classic two-trains problem — two trains approaching from opposite directions, a known distance apart, traveling at given speeds.
Case study — Domino's Pizza campaign: The main problem was to design a sales campaign as a Domino's Pizza manager: "If we don't deliver within x minutes, we give a y discount. Calculate x and y." I approached it by building a mathematical model:
ML questions: Precision vs. recall, multicollinearity, bagging and boosting techniques, Random Forest vs. other models.
Other notes: I tried to look up the hiring manager on LinkedIn beforehand but couldn't find him. I asked each interviewer why they'd stayed at Flipkart and asked them to share something about themselves.
Verdict: Cleared
Format: Video
Date: February 6th (I called HR at end-of-day; they confirmed all rounds cleared the next day and negotiation happened the same day)
Package discussion:
Verdict: Cleared (Offer extended)
I received the offer within 2–3 days of the HR round. The total timeline from referral (January 15th) to offer letter was about three weeks. The package included a 66% hike on the cash component and ESOP equal to my salary with 4-year vesting — competitive compared to the Amazon offer I'd received, but the Flipkart role and team felt like the better fit.
The Round 2 RCA was the hardest part — building and debating 20+ hypotheses across e-commerce factors when I came from a pharma background. I'd prep harder on case-study booklets and practice McKinsey-style case studies before an interview like this. Domain knowledge in e-commerce levers (seasonality, inventory, logistics, customer acquisition costs, etc.) would have helped me move faster.
I also noticed that every round opened with "Tell me about yourself" and closed with "Any questions for us?" — preparing both of those thoroughly meant interviewers didn't dig deeper into my CV, which worked in my favour.
Master case studies, not data wrangling. Data wrangling is increasingly handled by AI tools — focus your prep on McKinsey-style case studies and RCA frameworks. Study case-study booklets (an IIM-A friend's booklet was invaluable) and work through similar problems online. The Domino's problem and the RCA in Round 2 were where the real difficulty lay.
Build domain intuition before your interview. If you're coming from a different industry, spend time understanding e-commerce levers — inventory dynamics, logistics costs, customer acquisition, seasonality — so you can generate hypotheses quickly in a live case study.
Prepare "Tell me about yourself" and "Any questions for us?" thoroughly. Every single round opened and closed with these. A strong self-intro can signal confidence and reduce the depth of CV-digging; thoughtful questions for the interviewer (e.g., "Why have you stayed at Flipkart?") create a two-way conversation.