So after this -
https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/8377019/zomato-eternal-sde-1-interview-experienc-l2yh/

… After like 3-4 weeks, I got another opportunity from a different team at Zomato. The same recuriter reached out to me directly.

Round 1

1. Notification System Design

I was asked to design a notification system. The discussion went beyond the basic design and included constraints such as:

How other teams/services would integrate with the notification service.
Preventing duplicate notifications.
Implementing cooldowns at both the user level and team level.
Designing APIs and discussing scalability.

The interviewer kept adding constraints throughout the discussion.

2. Production Debugging Scenario

The next question was based on a real production incident the team had resolved around 10 days earlier.

The interviewer showed me a production database spike graph and asked:

What could have caused the spike?
How would you investigate it?
What changes would you make to flatten the spike, you can't increase latency or scale the system?

3. Graph Theory

The final question was a graph problem based on a story involving transformers.

Interestingly, the interviewer wasn't interested in code or even pseudocode. Instead, they wanted a mathematical proof of why the proposed solution was correct. The entire discussion revolved around proving the correctness of the algorithm rather than implementing it.