I appeared for interviews in Zepto for SDE 2 position in August 2024. The interviews were based on DSA and LLD. Find the details below.

Source : Recruiter reached out to me on phone call via Instahyre.

There were total of 4 rounds.

Round 1 : (DSA) -> Got two questions. Follow up questions were asked, emphasis was on TC and SC.

• Q1 : https://leetcode.com/problems/best-time-to-buy-and-sell-stock-ii/description/

• Q2 : https://leetcode.com/problems/rotting-oranges/description/

I was able to solve both these quetions as they were pretty much standard leetcode questions. I jumped to the optimal solution and skipped the brute force approaches. Interviewer was satisfied and gave good feedback at the end of interview.

Round 2 : (LLD) -> Interviewer asked one question on LLD, then some authentication concepts, then design patterns.

Q1 : Design a system for managing customer orders and deliveries in a quick commerce platform.

• How would you structure the system to manage customer orders, inventory, and deliveries?
• How would you design a system to handle order prioritization for fast delivery, especially during peak times?
• How would you handle different payment methods such as credit cards, digital wallets, and cash on delivery?

I gave the DB design first. After the interviewer agreed with the Schema, was asked to write APIs on adding products to cart and placing orders. Interviewer asked to handle edge cases and write proper error handling scenarios. Further we discussed order prioritization and other things mentioned in the above question for next 5 mins.

Q2 : How authentication can be done in the above two APIs.

Suggested JWT tokens here. Was asked what are JWT tokens are how they work as follow up questions.

Q3 : What kind of design patterns can be used here ?

I suggested Factory Pattern, Builder Patterns and Strategy Pattern for several features of the app. Interviewer deep dived into Factory Pattern. I suggested to use factory pattern for handling payments from different sources (point 3 from Q). Further I was asked to inmplement the Processors, Factory and exmaple usage for payments. I used Java and wrote implementations for Credit card payments (others were skipped) and then wrote a factory class to generate objects based on payment methods chosen by user. Also wrote a small code to use this.

Interviewer was satisfied. Interview lasted for 1 hr 15 mins.

Round 3 : (HM) -> One LLD question, One DSA, previous project discussion and Some behaviourial questions.

Q1 -> Design a app like Google Calendar.

• Users should be able to create meetings.
• Users can schedule events/meetings with a title, description, start/end time, location, and participants.
• Users can add participants to meetings and notify them.
• The system should send notifications for upcoming meetings.
• Users should be able to accept/decline invitations.

I was asked the DB design only. I made entities, columns and relationships to cover all the features asked above. Interviewer suggested to add more entities to add decoupling. Then asked how will you seperate a shared calendar and personal calendar for every user. I suggested adding few more columns in every event entity to identify the event as personal or shared event. Also added permissions section to allow shared events to be for View only or View/Edit access. Dicussion went on for 20 -25 mins. Interviewer seemed satisfied with my solution. Coding was skipped.

Q2 : Insert new nodes into a CLL in such a way that they always remain in sorted state.

Gave an O(n) optimal solution. Skipped brute force approach.

Interviewer seemed satisified and moved ahead.

Q3 : Interviewer asked what was your favourite features that you implemented in your previous orgs. Also asked how do you handle conficts in work and handle work pressure in tight deadlines.

I shared answers from my experience.

Round 4 : (HR) -> This round lasted for 20 mins and the HR mostly talked about the working culture at Zepto and took any questions I had in the end.

Results : Selected. I got the call next day about the offer.

Compensation : https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/5796402/Zepto-or-SDE-2-or-Bengaluru