Sharing my full interview loop for Deliveroo. The process was structured across DSA, system design, and behavioral rounds, with a noticeable emphasis on ownership and open-ended thinking.

Online Assessment (90 mins - Hackerrank)

Section 1:

• 15 multiple choice questions on data structures, algorithms, and system design fundamentals.

Section 2 - Coding Problem:

• Implement a simple Rate Limiter with per-user and per-time constraints.

Section 3 - REST API Problem:

• Build a function to fetch and return the finest hotel based on ratings from a provided API.
  Required pagination handling and efficient filtering.

Architecture / HLD Round

Topic:
Design a system to handle a flash sale of 6 million burgers in 10 minutes.

Focus Areas:

• Traffic throttling
• Inventory locking
• Order queuing
• Eventual consistency and failure handling
• No over selling

Behavioral Round

Discussion:
Went over five behavioral stories, covering leadership principles like:

• Ownership
• Dealing with failure
• Driving cross-functional decisions

Coding Round

Problem:
Implement a session-based authentication system with support for three types of queries:"generate","renew","count"

It was open-ended, with no fixed solution. Emphasis was on clean API design, data structures, boundary conditions, test cases and performance.

VP / Country Head Round

Discussion Topics:

• Leadership experiences: mentoring juniors, handling disagreement, and complex project delivery
• Strategic thinking around leveraging AI for team productivity
• Vision and product-aligned engineering contributions

Final Thoughts

Deliveroo's interview loop balanced system thinking, behavioral depth, and open-ended problem-solving.
Be ready to:

• Think at scale (esp. in HLD)
• Justify trade-offs clearly
• Talk through your engineering thought process during unstructured problems

Best of luck to others interviewing!

Compensation Details

YoE: 11.5 Years
Verdict: Offer Rejected