Interview Preparation Timeline: 30-Day, 60-Day, and 90-Day Plans for India 2026

30 days is enough time to refresh skills and target a specific company tier if you have a reasonable baseline (previous coding experience, some familiarity with data structures). This plan is for: engineers with 2+ years of experience targeting mid-tier product companies. Daily commitment: 2-3 hours. Week 1: DSA refresh: arrays, strings, hash maps, two pointers, sliding window (solve 20 Easy + 10 Medium LeetCode problems in these categories). Week 1: Behavioral: prepare 5 STAR stories covering: a challenging technical problem, a conflict, a failure, a leadership moment, and a time you influenced without authority. Week 2: DSA: trees and graphs (BFS, DFS, level order traversal), binary search, and stacks/queues. Solve 15-20 Medium problems. Read your target company's most frequently asked LeetCode problems (filter by company on LeetCode Premium). Week 2: System design: read one system design case study per day (URL shortener, rate limiter, notification system, video streaming at scale, ride-sharing system). Week 3: DSA: dynamic programming basics (70% of the time), linked lists, and heaps. Week 3: Mock interviews: do at least 3 mock interviews (with a peer, on Pramp, or with HireStepX's AI). Week 4: Company-specific: read the company's engineering blog, know their product, prepare 3-5 'Why this company' points. Final 3-5 days: light review, no new topics, more mock interviews. Target: pass OA + 1-2 interview rounds at mid-tier product companies.

60 days is the standard preparation window for most Indian engineers targeting product company roles. Daily commitment: 2-3 hours on weekdays, 4-5 hours on weekends. Month 1: Technical foundation: Week 1-2: Arrays, strings, hash maps, two pointers, sliding window. Solve 30 Easy + 20 Medium problems. Week 3-4: Trees (binary trees, BSTs), graphs (BFS, DFS, topological sort), binary search. Solve 20 Medium problems. Concurrently: read one system design topic per weekday (start with the fundamentals: load balancer, caching, databases, message queues). Month 2: Depth and integration: Week 5-6: Dynamic programming (knapsack, LCS, LIS, matrix DP: the most commonly tested DP patterns). Heaps and priority queues. Tries (if targeting companies that test strings heavily). Solve 25 Medium + 5 Hard problems. Week 6-7: System design practice: for each topic you studied in Month 1, do a full 30-minute system design mock (design a URL shortener, design a ride-sharing backend, design a notification system). Week 7-8: Behavioral preparation: STAR stories for all major question categories. Mock interviews: minimum 5 full mock interviews (1 DSA round + 1 system design round + 1 behavioural round each). Week 8: company-specific preparation for the specific companies you are targeting. Target: pass OA + 3-4 interview rounds at most Indian product companies.

90 days is the recommended window for targeting FAANG India (Amazon, Google, Microsoft), Goldman Sachs India, and top unicorn roles (Razorpay Staff/Senior, Flipkart SDE-2). Daily commitment: 3-4 hours minimum. The 90-day plan is the 60-day plan with additional depth: extra 2 weeks on advanced DSA (segment trees, Fenwick trees, advanced graph algorithms: Dijkstra, Bellman-Ford, minimum spanning tree, network flow basics), extra 2 weeks on system design depth (read Designing Data-Intensive Applications cover to cover, not just summaries), and 4 additional weeks for company-specific deep preparation. FAANG-specific additions: Amazon: for each Leadership Principle (16 total), prepare at least one strong STAR story. The behavioural round is as critical as the technical rounds at Amazon India. Google: emphasis on problem-solving approach: Google values clear articulation of reasoning over the final answer. Practise explaining your thinking continuously while coding. Microsoft: often includes both coding and a collaborative 'pair programming' round: practise working through a problem with a partner. Tracking progress: keep a spreadsheet of every problem solved, categorised by topic and difficulty. Review any problem you could not solve within 25 minutes. Weekly mock interviews (minimum 2 per week from Week 4 onwards). Target: pass OA + all rounds at FAANG India or top unicorn roles.