Background
Education: BTech CSE, 2022-2026 , Tier - 3 college
Experience: 1 Year of InternShip Experience in Product Based Company

Opportunity details
Date: August , 2026
Location: Gurugram, India
Role: SDE-1
Applied: Applied via Referral 4 months prior

Round 1 (1 Hour 45 Minutes)

The interviewer was an SDE-2 from the GenAI team. He introduced himself and explained about his work. As our work was quite aligned, we discussed a lot about the current architecture of my current company, followed by several follow-up questions.

Topics discussed:

• One ongoing problem Zomato is trying to solve, and how I would approach solving it.

• Scaling and failures (around a 10-minute discussion).

• Databases:

  • Why SQL vs NoSQL?
  • Database pooling.
  • Indexing.
  • How databases can make applications slow.

Round 2 (1Hour 20 Minutes)

Again, the interviewer was an SDE-2 from the Zomato Core team. We introduced ourselves and straight away went into the problem-solving round.

• A hard DP question was given. I solved it in the IDE, and the interviewer expected a working code. I was able to solve it with the optimized approach in around 20–25 minutes.
• We then moved to Event-Driven Architecture, where I explained the Pub/Sub model using Redis.
• This was followed by an in-depth discussion on Redis:
  • Why Redis is single-threaded.
  • Redis internals.
  • Cache population and eviction strategies.
  • Where caching can be used effectively.
  • Hot Key (Celebrity Problem).
  • Cache Thundering (Thundering Herd Problem) and ways to handle it.
• In the end, we wrote pseudo code for an LFU Cache and discussed how an LRU Cache works.

Round 3 (Engineering Manager – 10+ Years of Experience) (1 Hour)

The interviewer was an Engineering Manager with 10+ years of experience.

We had an in-depth discussion around my internship experience, the projects I worked on, and why I made certain design decisions.

After that, we worked on one High-Level Design (HLD) problem.

The discussion also covered:

• Database design.
• When to use SQL vs NoSQL.
• Database choices for AI Agents and the reasoning behind those decisions.

Round 4 (VP of Engineering – 30 Minutes)

The final round was with the VP of Engineering.

The discussion was more conversational and focused on:

• How I see the work culture at Zomato.
• My thoughts on the pace of engineering and execution at Zomato.
• Feedback on my interview experience across all the previous rounds.

....

I received the offer.

Overall, it was a great interview experience. Every round focused on understanding my thought process rather than just testing theoretical knowledge. The discussions were practical, engineering-focused, and
I genuinely enjoyed interacting with everyone throughout the process.