Round 1 ~ With Senior Engineering Manager

Education: B.Tech (Core branch), NIT Raipur, 2025 batch
YOE: ~2 months (FTE) + 1.6 years Internship experience

Topics / Questions Asked

1. Payments System Design

• End-to-end payment flow orchestration
• Chargeback handling
• Dispute lifecycle (won/lost)
• Refunds (full, partial, proration)
• Audit & compliance requirements (India)
• HLD of taxation + billing architecture

2. Event-Driven Systems

• Kafka vs SNS + SQS
• When to use each
• Trade-offs around ordering, replayability, and scale

3. Low-Level Design(Last 20 minutes)

• Design a Zomato Enterprise system for offering food benefits to companies and their employees
• Core services and interactions
• Order lifecycle
• Payment and order consistency
• Restaurant and delivery partner flow

4. Security / Reliability

• Handling a DDoS attack:

  • Rate limiting (frontend & backend)
  • Caching
  • Queue-based buffering

(The interviewer was not fully convinced by the approaches discussed.)

Feedback / Verdict

• The feedback was that I handled the happy-path flows and overall system reasoning well, but the discussion needed more depth in non-happy-path scenarios, especially around:

  • End-to-end microservice orchestration (failure handling, retries, and cross-service consistency)
  • Database modeling for complex, real-world workflows

• The interviewer mentioned that the expectations for this role were closer to someone with more hands-on production experience, particularly in building and operating distributed systems at scale

• I was told I was ~80% close, and that for my current experience level, the architecture choices, identification of bottlenecks, and high-level trade-offs were strong

• However, the role required deeper practical exposure, and for an entry-level position, I would likely have been moved forward to the next round

• I was informed that if a suitable entry-level opening becomes available within the team in the next 3–6 months, HR may reach out directly to schedule Round 2 for same team