District by Zomato | SDE-1 | R-1 | Interview Experience
Summary
I had a 1‑hour interview consisting of a DSA sliding‑window problem followed by backend fundamentals discussion, and the interviewer was friendly and conversational.
Full Experience
Company: District by Zomato Role: Backend Engineer / SDE-1 Location: Gurgaon Experience: 0 (1 year of internship experience)
Round 1 – DSA + Backend
~1 hour
Started with a sliding window problem:
Given an integer array and
k, find the longest contiguous subarray where no element appears more thanktimes.
Solved using sliding window + hashmap. Discussed the approach, dry run and complexity, then coded it in C++.
Then moved into backend fundamentals and whatever I have written on my resume:
- PostgreSQL indexes and when to use them
- Query optimization /
EXPLAIN ANALYZE - Batching DB queries
- Stateful vs stateless architecture
- REST APIs and handling large responses
- Kafka vs SQS
- Kafka partitions, ordering and replayability
- Consumer idempotency
- Prometheus/Grafana and high-cardinality labels
The round was quite conversational and most questions were follow‑ups based on things I had worked on. The follow ups were good and quite deep rather than on surface level knowing what, why and how of everything i speak out.
Interviewer was friendly and gave enough time to explain the reasoning.
Overall, pretty good experience with the round. Hopeful to get R2
Interview Questions (1)
Longest Subarray with Each Element Appearing At Most k Times
Given an integer array and an integer k, find the longest contiguous subarray such that no element appears more than k times within that subarray.