Nugget by Zomato SDE-1 Interview Experience (August 2025)

Background

Experience: 1 year 3 months

Coding Practice: 800+ problems solved on LeetCode, Limited CP

Education: B.Tech in Non Circuital Branch, IIT

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How it Started

On a random Sunday, I received a call from Nugget's HR. I had cold-emailed her earlier regarding an SDE opportunity at Nugget. She asked if I would like to apply for SDE-1 or SDE-2. Given my experience, I felt SDE-1 was more relevant, and she scheduled my interview for Friday evening.

However, the timing was rescheduled last minute to Monday in the night.

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Round 1

Interviewer: SDE-III (~5 YOE)

The interviewer began by introducing himself and his work. I followed with my introduction and explained my experience. He seemed curious about my current organization and asked in detail about our work, specifically the tech stack and my recent contributions to the team.

Interestingly, we found some overlap in areas like FFmpeg scripts for video transformation and Salesforce API integrations. We discussed various use cases, challenges, and my approach to solving them.

He shared a Google Doc with the following problem:

DSA Problem

You are given a list of n people labeled 0 to n-1. Some of them are directly friends with each other, represented as pairs in friendships. A friend circle is a group of people who are directly or indirectly friends.

Example:
n = 5

friendships = [[0, 1], [2, 3], [3, 4]]
Output: 2

Explanation: {0,1}, {2,3,4}

I explained the typical graph traversal approach (DFS/BFS) for counting connected components. He then asked for time and space complexity analysis.

Follow-up Question

Count the redundant edges (connections that can be removed without affecting the number of friend circles).

I solved this using a DSU (Disjoint Set Union) approach. He focused on understanding my reasoning around path compression and the amortized complexity of DSU operations being O(α(n)) (Inverse Ackermann function).

During implementation, I encountered a small bug in rank updation but fixed it on my own. He appreciated my debugging approach.

System Design Question

Since we were running out of time, he asked a lightweight system design question:

Design a peer-to-peer Chess Game

Players should be able to play online against similarly rated opponents. Future features may include tournaments and leaderboards.

I started asking clarifying questions, but he asked me to directly discuss data modeling (tables, schema, etc.) due to time constraints. We briefly discussed the high-level schema before closing the interview.

Feedback

Right after the interview, he called to say he would confirm if I was moving forward. Within 10 minutes, he called again with positive feedback:

• He was impressed that I coded from scratch, then applied path compression and debugged efficiently.
• He warned that the next round would be heavily focused on HLD/LLD, so I should be well prepared.

Soon after, HR scheduled my Round 2 for Tuesday evening.

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Round 2

Interviewer: SDE-III (~4 YOE)

After introductions, he directly gave a System Design Problem Statement:

Problem Statement: Ad Pacing Service

Restaurants run ad campaigns on Zomato (e.g., Domino’s paying ₹10,000 with cost per click ₹10 → 1,000 tokens allocated). Ads should last for the entire campaign duration (1 day) instead of being exhausted within the first few hours.

Challenges:

• Large scale (Zomato-level traffic)
• Handling peak and non-peak hour traffic
• Ensuring tokens are distributed fairly across the day

Discussion

I asked a few clarifying questions on scale, peak-hour distribution, and handling over-clicks. Initially, I struggled a bit (since this was my first-ever design interview). After a few wrong turns, I proposed an hour-wise rate-limiting algorithm:

• Assign weights to hours (e.g., more tokens in peak hours, fewer in off-peak hours).
• Distribute tokens accordingly to ensure pacing.

He seemed satisfied with this approach and asked me to sketch an HLD diagram.

We discussed:

• Ad Pacing Microservice (Core logic + DB/Cache/Queue interactions)
• Kafka Queue & Consumer Groups (decoupling click collection and pacing logic)
• Read-heavy DB setup (Master-Slave with Load Balancer)
• Read-level caching
• To avoid a single point of failure in the cache, we discussed cache sharding
• Initially suggested hashing, then refined to consistent hashing

The interview ended on a positive note. He seemed happy with the pacing algorithm and system design discussion.

Although he said he’d call within an hour with feedback, I didn’t hear back. I assumed I might have messed up in the initial fumbling and that they might not be moving forward with me.

However, on Thursday, HR informed me that I had cleared the round and would have 2 in-person rounds at the Zomato office on Monday. The office interview would have been on their expense (travel and accommodation), but since I was already in Gurgaon, it wasn’t needed.

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Round 3

Interviewer: Senior Engineering Manager (~10 YOE)

Discussion points:

• Why Nugget?
• Why I preferred remote work earlier?
• Recent features I was working on (he grilled deeper into logic, Design, DB choices, and Reasoning)

Then he shifted to work culture:

• Shared that at Nugget, people often work 10–12 hours daily, sometimes 14+ and weekends too
• Asked me to be very sure if I’d be able to sustain such work culture
• Suggested I connect with him directly before joining, if offered

This round felt more like culture fit + stress test than pure technical.

After this round, I was asked to wait, and after a while, I was called into the conference room for the next round.

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Round 4

Interviewer : VP at Zomato

- We introduced ourselves and talked about my background.

- He emphasized Nugget’s 5-day WFO culture (with rare WFH exceptions) and asked if it would be an issue for me. I said no.

- He stressed that one needs to work with full heart and ownership to succeed here, almost as if running your own startup.

- He disclosed the compensation for SDE-1 and mentioned that negotiations are not entertained. However, there would be exponential growth opportunities with performance.

- I clarified doubts about notice period and other formalities.

We ended with a handshake and he said: “Welcome to Eternal!”

On the same evening, I received my offer letter with all the details.

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Overall

Overall, it was a very positive interview experience for me, the process was smooth, and the results came quickly, so I never had to wait long for updates. The interviewers were open to discussion, and made me feel comfortable throughout. It left me with a great impression of both the team and the culture.