Current: 5.5 years of experience
Location: Bangalore

A recruiter approached me in LinkedIn during mid Jan. I was not looking for change, was approached by Amazon USA recruiter as well around the same time. Got triggered by the idea of relocating to EU/US and decided to give a shot. I did some prep for Amazon, but nothing specifically for Delivery Hero.

Codility Online Test (75mins - Jan Week 4):
The test had 4 questions. All LC medium-hard levels. Dont exactly remember the questions and my performance.
Feedback: Cleared to next

HR Intro call (30mins - Jan Week 4):
This was a casual introduction round. Getting to know each other, reasons behind relocation, tech background, salary expectations and then recruiter detailed me about the process.

Round 1 (1hr - Feb Week 2):
This round was taken by an engineer similar to the level I applied.
I had Elasticsearch in my resume which I had worked on 3years ago. Interviewer asked 2-3 basic questions on Elasticsearch which I could answer and then he went into depth on it. I couldnt answer both the in-depth questions on ES. Then there were discussions on Infrastructure as Code. He was more keen on Terraform which I had never used. There were also few basic questions about microservices & REST APIs.
Coding question: Given a list of words and a word, return the list of words that has similar patterns as given word. Ex: Words=[aabbcc, aakkff, akkffkk, tjjiijj, deftg]. word="mnnssnn". Output=[akkffkk, tjjiijj]

Feedback: Cleared to next round

Round 2 (1hr - Feb Week 3):
This round was taken by the hiring manager.
Discussions around current project and challenges, microservices, sql vs nosql.
Coding question: Count the number of words in given string. Could not do it using java string methods as there was no autocomplete. I did not remember the method names and the parameters to it. Later coded without using inbuilt methods.

Feedback: To next round

Bar Raiser Round (1hr - Feb Week 4):
This round was taken by an engineering manager/director of some other random team.
Discussions on project, databases and a coding question.
Coding question: Greatest element, Second greatest element and kth greatest element.

Feedback: Cleared

Feedback Call (45mins - Mar Week 1):
I was told that there will be an offer, but a SE-2 offer. I had applied for SSE role. The reason they gave was that I was not good with Elasticsearch & Terraform and that I could not solve Round 2 question with inbuilt methods. The SE-2 offer meant that the salary band would come down to 70k-75k euros from my expectation of 90k-95k euros. I had to accept/reject in a week time.

The initial offer was a lowball and peanuts considering my current salary in India and cost of living in Germany. I had to negotiate twice to atleast get it to higher 70s. Apart from this, DH provided relocation support of 5k euros plus flight tickets.

I had offer from Zalando, Berlin around the same time. But to my bad luck, it was also a similar role and pay range. I had a hard time choosing the one among two. The downlevel here did not make sense to me since I had never used Terraform and both Terraform and ES was not required for my role. Expecting to remember inbuilt methods is not a fair ask as well. The interviews are fairly easy if you are working on microservices in your day to day work. It is mostly focused around microservices, projects and general tech questions with last 10-15mins for a simple coding question that can be coded well within 10mins.

Delivery Hero did not look like a stable company, but I liked the team and the work in team for which I was being hired for. Work life balance also looked great when I asked few of my friends working at DH. I had a pleasant conversation with my to be manager during Round 2, and this led me to accept DH offer over the Zalando offer, which was a stable company according to me.

But overall, I was still in doubts and was not happy with the offer. I accepted it just because its an offer to work in Berlin and relocate to Europe. I am enjoying my current work with good pay, I had a feeling that DH would be a downgrade from my current organistaion and role.

Meanwhile, I got the contract from DH in first week of April which I signed. Joining date given was three months from the date. They put me in touch with relocation team for relocation support who would help me with visa and relocations. I had to book the visa appointment and was taking my own time.
In the second week of April, I got an update from DH that I will be moved to another team. This team had completely different tech stack and after the discussions with the team lead following week, I felt the work was boring to the core. This is when my 50-50ish mind started tilting towards not joining DH. I took more time to confirm myself on this. Only thing I was loosing was a chance to relocate and live in Europe. Rest all points were positives with my current work itself. I finally declined to join DH on May second week. I did not have any other offers while declining this and I never booked visa appointment since I was in doubt throughout.

Other interview experiences: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience?currentPage=1&orderBy=hot&query=&tag=anonymousengineer