Eternal (Zomato) | SDE Intern + FTE | Dec 2025 | Off Campus | Cleared
Summary
Final year CSE student at a Tier-3 University secured an SDE Intern + FTE offer at Zomato through an off-campus referral. The interview process included system design, database reasoning, API thinking, and DSA challenges, focusing on design thinking and problem-solving approaches.
Full Experience
Applied off-campus through a referral for the SDE-I role. Round 1 was a mix of system design, DB reasoning, API thinking, and backend engineering concepts. The interviewer focused on design decisions rather than perfect knowledge. I discussed my backend projects, Zomato's product understanding, and designed the online ordering flow, including user and restaurant manager side flows. We discussed SQL vs NoSQL, geographical data handling, and S3 image uploads. Round 2 was more intense, covering system design, message brokers, and DSA. I tackled a rate limiter design, real-time support chat design, MongoDB indexing, and a DSA problem on longest valid parenthesis subsequence. Round 3 was a culture + team fit discussion with the VP of Technology, where I was officially extended the offer.
Interview Questions (3)
Design a rate limiter that can handle burst traffic. The interviewer asked to implement a simple one and discussed the sliding window approach. They wanted to understand how to prevent bursts of requests while allowing a certain number of requests within a time window.
Find the longest valid parenthesis subsequence (discontinuous) in a given string. The problem requires identifying the longest subsequence of parentheses that are properly nested and closed, even if they are not contiguous.
Design a real-time support chat system that handles 1-to-1 chat between customer and agent, then extends to multi-user groups with message visibility and permissions. The discussion covered when SQL and NoSQL (MongoDB) are better suited for chat systems.