Short answer: yes, if you are applying to a product company or a GCC in India. Coding rounds do not disappear because your CV has five years on it. At the SDE-2 level, most loops still open with a timed online assessment and one or two DSA rounds before anyone asks about design. What changes with experience is the weight, not the presence: past five or six years the offer is usually decided in the design and hiring-manager rounds, and DSA becomes the filter you must not fail rather than the round you must win.
That distinction is the whole plan. A working professional with fifteen hours a week cannot out-grind a final-year student, so the question is not how many problems to solve. It is how many of your 90 days DSA actually deserves.
Is DSA required for experienced professionals in India?
It depends on the employer, and that gap is wider than any gap between experience levels.
IT services companies — TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, HCL — screen laterally on aptitude, CS fundamentals and a project discussion. Coding appears, but lightly. Product companies and global capability centres run a different loop: timed assessment first, then live coding, then design. Your years change which round carries the decision, not whether the coding round exists.
The market is pushing more candidates toward the second group. India's tech industry added about 135,000 net jobs in FY26 to reach roughly 6 million direct employees, up 2.3%, and now houses more than 1,750 GCCs (NASSCOM, Strategic Review 2026). GCCs and product companies are exactly the employers that run product-style loops.
The services side is softer than the headline. The Naukri JobSpeak index for September 2026 stood at 3,053, up 2% year on year — but IT-Software/Software Services postings were 4% below September 2025 (3,432 against 3,585), the 4-7 year band fell 2%, and only 8-12 years (+5%) and AI/ML (+20%) grew (Naukri JobSpeak, September 2026). Fewer openings against an unchanged applicant pool is when companies add a screening round rather than remove one.
Which employers actually ask for DSA?
| Employer type | First screen | DSA weight | What decides the offer |
|---|---|---|---|
| IT services | Aptitude plus technical basics | Light | Project depth, communication |
| GCC or captive centre | Online assessment, 1-2 coding problems | Medium to high | Coding, design, domain match |
| Indian product company | Online assessment, 2-3 problems | High | Coding plus machine coding or LLD |
| Global big tech in India | Online assessment, 2 coding rounds | Very high | Coding, design, behavioural |
Loops change with team and level, so treat this as the shape, not the rule. But the timed coding screen comes first in all four.
What changes with experience
| Experience | DSA role in the loop | Also required | Share of 90 days on DSA |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0-2 years | The gate | Aptitude, projects | About 70% |
| 2-5 years | Still the gate | Machine coding or LLD | About 55% |
| 5-8 years | A screen you must clear | HLD, ownership stories | About 35% |
| 8+ years | Appears at some employers | HLD, scope, leadership | About 20% |
The last row surprises people. Senior candidates assume DSA is behind them, stop practising, then meet a 90-minute assessment with two medium problems and no autocomplete. A bad afternoon to discover the skill has gone cold.
The round that does not change: the online assessment
The assessment is where experienced candidates most often lose the job, and it is not close. It is timed, auto-graded, and nobody has read your CV. Two medium problems in 90 minutes against hidden test cases is a different skill from writing maintainable code on a team, and it decays fastest when unused.
Practise it the way it happens: a plain editor, no autocomplete, no AI assistant, a timer running, submitted only when it passes the sample cases. If you solve with a copilot in the next pane, you are training a version of the interview that does not exist.
The real constraint is hours, not problem count
LeetCode's own problem list carried 4,096 problems on 31 October 2026. The two lists people actually finish are far smaller: NeetCode 150 is 150 problems (28 easy, 101 medium, 21 hard) and the older Blind 75 is 75 (neetcode.io, 2026). The distance between 4,096 and 150 is not a shortcut. It is the difference between a curriculum and an archive.
So do the arithmetic before you pick a list. Fifteen and a half hours a week — 90 minutes on five weekdays, four hours on each weekend day — is roughly what a full-time job leaves. Over 90 days that is 199 hours, and after losing two weeks to a release, travel or a family function it is closer to 168.
At about 70 minutes per new problem — 25 attempting, 20 reading the editorial, 15 re-implementing from scratch, 10 writing the pattern note — 168 hours buys roughly 87 new problems, not 300. A quarter to re-solving problems you have done, 15% to timed mocks, and the budget lands here:
| Block | Days | New problems | Re-solves | Timed mocks | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pattern map | 1-30 | 38 | 22 | 3 | 55 |
| The hard middle | 31-60 | 32 | 48 | 6 | 61 |
| Interview shape | 61-90 | 17 | 56 | 11 | 52 |
That is the entire plan, and it is fewer than half of NeetCode 150. It is enough, because a problem you can re-solve cold in 25 minutes is worth four problems you watched a video about.
The 90 days, block by block
Days 1-30: build the pattern map
Eight patterns, in this order: arrays and hashing, two pointers, sliding window, stack, binary search, linked list, trees, heap. That is 38 new problems over four weeks, about five a week, plus 22 re-solves.
For each pattern write one page before moving on: the trigger that tells you to use it, the template you can reproduce from memory, and three problems that use it. The page is the asset. The solved problem is a by-product.
Exit test: shown an unseen problem, you name the pattern within five minutes, eight times out of ten.
Days 31-60: the part everyone quits
Graphs (BFS, DFS, topological sort, union-find), backtracking, one- and two-dimensional dynamic programming, intervals, greedy. Most working professionals stop here, because problems stop being solvable in one sitting and the feedback loop disappears.
Change what counts as done. In this block a problem is finished when you can state the recurrence or the traversal order out loud, not when the tests pass. Thirty-two new problems is deliberately fewer than block one: 48 re-solves are due from block one, and skipping them is how the first month evaporates.
From day 31, stop solving by topic. Pull ten random problems a week from everything you have covered: the interview does not label the topic.
Exit test: three medium problems in 90 minutes, cold, in a plain editor.
Days 61-90: mocks, and the calendar
Seventeen new problems only, all from the company tags of the three to five companies you are applying to. The rest is eleven timed mocks, each followed by a written review of where you lost time: reading, pattern choice, coding, or debugging.
Exit test: five consecutive mocks finishing two problems in 45 minutes, with the time and space complexity stated out loud without being asked.
Where the plan breaks
Reading the editorial before attempting. Look after five minutes and you learn that problem; after twenty-five, you learn the pattern. The twenty minutes of being stuck is what transfers.
Practising with an AI assistant open. The assessment has no assistant. You are training a skill you will not be allowed to use.
Practising in a full IDE. Autocomplete will not be there. Use a plain editor at least weekly from block one.
Never doing a timed set. Volume without a clock produces someone who can solve problems and cannot finish an assessment.
The India-specific constraint: your notice period
If you are at a large Indian services firm, your appointment letter almost certainly asks for 60 or 90 days. That number decides when you apply, not when you start preparing, and it is why a 90-day plan is the right length rather than an arbitrary one.
Work backwards. An offer in hand on day 60 means day 60 plus notice, so an April start means applying in January. JobSpeak's last twelve readings peaked in February at 3,233 and bottomed last October at 2,480 — postings, not offers, but a fair proxy for when requisitions open. A plan finishing in January interviews into the rising part of that curve. The festival calendar moves, so this year's dip may fall in November; check the current month before fixing dates.
Leaving early has its own mechanics: buying out a notice period in India. Read that before you accept a joining date, not after.
If you only have five hours a week
Do not compress the plan. Extend it. At five hours a week the same 87 problems take about 4.7 months, and that is a fine outcome — six months at five hours beats 90 days at fifteen followed by nothing.
If your targets are services companies, DSA is probably not your binding constraint — a resume that survives ATS screening and a referral into the right team will move you further. Start with why you are not getting interview calls from Naukri, then come back to algorithms when the pipeline is producing interviews.
Switching in from a non-software background? The shape is the same one we used in the mechanical-to-software switch plan; the constraint was hours, not talent.
FAQ
Is DSA required for experienced professionals in India?
At product companies and GCCs, yes: coding rounds appear at every level, usually starting with a timed assessment. At IT services companies it is lighter, often limited to fundamentals. Moving from services to product, assume it is required.
How many DSA problems should I solve in 90 days?
About 87 new problems plus roughly 126 re-solves, on a fifteen-hour week. Well short of the 300-plus figure that circulates online, and enough, because the re-solves do the work. At 25 hours a week the same structure scales to about 150 new problems.
Can I prepare for DSA while working full time?
Yes, at about fifteen hours a week: 90 minutes on five weekdays and four hours on each weekend day. The failure mode is not the hours but the consistency — a plan needing four hours on a Tuesday collapses the first week work goes wrong.
Is DSA asked at 8 or 10 years of experience?
At some employers, particularly GCCs and product companies that apply one loop at every level. The coding round is then a screen rather than the deciding round, so failing it is expensive and the practice needed is lower — about a fifth of your preparation time rather than half.
Do I need system design along with DSA?
From about two to five years, expect machine coding or low-level design in the same loop as your coding rounds. Past five years, high-level design usually carries more weight than either. Practising only DSA for an SDE-2 role is a common way to clear the coding rounds and still not get the offer.