Zynga | SSE | Bengaluru/Remote | July '22 [Reject]

I recently interviewed at Zynga for an SSE role in July '22, with approximately 5 years of experience. The process began with a recruiter call following my resume screening.

Round 1 (1.5 hr)

This round started with basic questions about my current project and overall experience. Following that, we delved into generic questions on topics like load balancers, authentication vs. authorization, DNS, and the classic "what happens when you enter a URL in a browser."

The coding problem was:

• Given a M x N integer matrix, convert all negative numbers to positive numbers in the minimum number of passes. In each pass, for a given positive number at (i, j), negative numbers at adjacent locations (i-1, j), (i+1, j), (i, j-1), (i, j+1) can be converted to positive.

I approached this problem with a BFS-based solution, which seemed to work.

Round 2 (1 hr)

I was informed that this would be a problem-solving/LLD round, but it turned out to be more of a system design round.

The first design question was:

• Design a real-time notification system for an app like Cricbuzz. The requirement was for users to receive live notifications for any current match events (e.g., 4s/6s hit, maiden over, milestones reached), and the system needed to be scalable for millions of users.

I provided a High-Level Design (HLD) outlining the components. The discussion then shifted to handling requests on the client side versus the server side. The interviewer was looking for a solution centered around the observer pattern, and I wasn't able to make significant progress there.

The second question in this round was:

• Design a system to open and close windows with the following operations:
  1. openWindow(windowName): Should open a new window on top of already existing windows.
  2. closeWindow(windowName): Should close a given window.
  3. getTopWindow(): Should retrieve the most recently opened window.

Initially, I proposed a stack-based solution. However, realizing that the closeWindow operation would be O(N) with a stack, I then suggested an optimized solution using a doubly linked list combined with a Map. This approach would ensure all operations run in O(1) time. The interviewer, however, didn't seem entirely pleased with the added space complexity of my second solution.

Verdict

I was rejected after Round 2. Overall, it was a good experience.