Company: District by Zomato
Role: SDE-1
Location: Gurgaon
Experience: 1.2 YOE (small scale startup)
Internal referral
Total rounds: 3

Round 1 – DSA + HLD

Total time: 1h10m

• Design a notification system for something like food delivery:

  • Multiple channels (Push, SMS, Email etc.)
  • Some notifications go to only one channel
  • Some go to multiple channels
  • Must avoid sending duplicate notifications
  • Discussion around scalability

  Had indepth discussion on Kafka, scaling kafka and tradeoffs.

• DSA: Variation of range / merge-interval type problem:

  • Started with nLog(n).
  • Optimised using Map to (n).

Went Really well, interviewer was very friendly and comforting from the start and at this point told me I'll me moving to R2.

Round 2 – Deep Resume Drill + DSA

Total time: 1h30m

• Resume Grill:(1h)

  • Complete deep dive into my resume
  • Database fundamentals
  • System design decisions in my past projects
  • Why I chose X over Y
  • Trade-offs in the library I used

  Interviewer went really deep into a specific past project.
  Fumbled at a certain place, else well decent.

• DSA: Implement the algoritm used in the library(20m-25m)

  • Wasn't similar to any leetcode question.
  • Was able to write using recursion, asked if needs to be optimised using dp, but were already past 1h30m mark.

I was a bit skeptical with this round, was not able to defend what I did at a specific point, else was able to answer most of the things.

Round 3 – Managerial

Total time: 30m
- Basic prior experiences, why in tech, why Zomato.
- Expectations, work culture, etc.
- Got offer details in this round.

Overall experience was really great.
Along with system design, be thoroughly prepared with CS fundamentals, DSA and concepts used in the past projects.

Other experiences:
Urban Company: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/7617185/urban-company-sde-1-interview-experience-6q0a/
Acko Insurance: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/7617272/acko-sde-1-interview-experience-by-anony-m90u/