Zomato / Eternal | SDE-1 Interview Experience

So after getting rejected earlier due to "lack of years of experience" here:

https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/7609011/zomato-swe1-interview-experience-by-anon-hzky/

... I got another opportunity from a different team at Zomato. The team lead reached out to me directly.

I started preparing all over again with full energy and honestly gave it everything I had.

Round 1 - Senior Software Engineer

HLD + DB Schema Design

Designed a schema for delivery partners and orders.

Follow-up:

Write a DB query to find the top 5 delivery partners in an area based on the highest count of a certain order type (there were 3 order types; don’t remember the exact details).

Coding:

Special Keyboard Imagine you have a special keyboard with the following keys:

Key 1: Prints 'A' on screen Key 2: (Ctrl-A): Select screen Key 3: (Ctrl-C): Copy selection to buffer Key 4: (Ctrl-V): Print buffer on screen appending it after what has already been printed. Find maximum numbers of A's that can be produced by pressing keys on the special keyboard N times.

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Round 2 - Team Lead

Got the call after 3 days.

Discussion:

Basic system design discussion around rate limiting.

Implementation:

• Token Bucket
• Fixed Window

Couldn’t fully implement Sliding Window.

Coding:

https://leetcode.com/problems/jump-game-iv/description/

Follow-up:

"How would you handle the above problem if each step also had an associated weight/cost?"

Additional Coding:

Given a 2N x 2N matrix of integers. You are allowed to reverse any row or column any number of times and in any order. The task is to calculate the maximum sum of the upper-left N X N submatrix i.e the sum of elements of the submatrix from (0, 0) to (N - 1, N - 1).

Solved everything within the given hour.

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Round 3 - Senior Engineering Manager (In-person, Bangalore Office)

Got the call after 5 days.

Reached on time, but the original interviewer was on PTO and there was an ongoing production incident.

Ended up waiting ~1.5 hours past the scheduled interview time before another interviewer joined.

Main Discussion:

Design a resilient notification system at Zomato scale:

• avoid duplicate notifications
• crash resilience
• retry guarantees
• fault tolerance

I was able to come up with a workable design pretty quickly.

Then came 3-4 follow-up questions:

• 3 felt straightforward
• 1 required some thinking; took around 2 minutes, but I eventually answered it successfully

The interviewer genuinely seemed happy with the discussion and my overall approach. The conversation flowed smoothly, and I walked out feeling pretty confident.

Verdict

Ghosted.

Honestly, I genuinely don’t know what exactly companies expect anymore for SDE-1 roles.

This one was frustrating, and at this point I’m genuinely feeling burnt out with the entire process.

After 3 weeks, I finally received feedback from the R3 interviewer.

Apparently, not being able to confidently justify "why MySQL vs PostgreSQL" during one part of the discussion was considered a major concern.

He mentioned that instead of overexplaining, I could have simply said:

"I don’t yet have enough real‑world exposure to confidently make that tradeoff."

The ironic part is that he himself mentioned the overall system design was good and didn’t have major flaws.

Another reason he gave was that during one follow‑up question, I took some time to fully understand what the interviewer was asking and needed 2‑3 iterations before arriving at the final solution. According to him, that itself was considered a negative signal.

And honestly, I’m really frustrated.

After solving:

• 2 LeetCode Hard problems
• 2 LeetCode Medium problems
• multiple system design discussions without major flaws

… I still got rejected.

Like genuinely, what more are companies expecting for SDE-1 roles these days?

Do you want to hear the funny part??? I got a call again from same HR after 3 weeks, that I am shortlisted again for search team this time, man i am feeling traumtised totally

And now for the plot twist...

Three weeks after rejecting me, the same HR reached out again:

"Hey! You're shortlisted again—this time for the Search team at Zomato."

So apparently I'm qualified enough to interview again... just not qualified enough to get an offer.

Man, I'm genuinely traumatized at this point. R1 is over and i feel like i am disqualified/ghosted again.