Zomato interview process (2026)

Round-by-round breakdown of the Zomato software engineering interview across 4 levels and 15 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.

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SDE Intern (6-month Software Engineering / Full-Stack Internship, Aug-Jan, ~INR 1L/mo stipend, intern+PPO)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~1-2 days · Recommended prep: 6-8 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Online Assessment (DSA coding + CS-fundamentals MCQs)

    Assessment · ~90 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank

    Sample question: Minimum Swaps to Sort — Given an array of distinct integers, find the minimum number of swaps required to sort it in ascending order. (Zomato's OA variant frames it as 'minimum swaps to sort the non-zero elements', where each swap involves one zero and one non-zero element.) Use the cycle-decomposition idea: map each value to its sorted position and count cycles; a cycle of length L costs L-1 swaps.

  2. Round 1: Technical Interview 1 (DSA + CS fundamentals / backend basics; JS+React for frontend track)

    Onsite · ~45-80 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Maximal Square — Given an m x n binary matrix of 0s and 1s, find the largest square containing only 1s and return its area. Use DP where dp[i][j] = side length of the largest all-1 square whose bottom-right corner is (i,j): if grid[i][j]==1 then dp[i][j] = 1 + min(dp[i-1][j], dp[i][j-1], dp[i-1][j-1]).

  3. Round 2: Technical Interview 2 (system-design / distributed-systems intuition, or advanced JS/React)

    Onsite · ~60 minutes · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Minimum Size Subarray Sum — Given an array of positive integers and a target integer, return the length of the shortest contiguous subarray whose sum is greater than or equal to target. If no such subarray exists, return 0. Expected O(n) time using a sliding window.

  4. Round 3: HR / Hiring-Manager round (behavioral + values fit)

    Behavioral · ~30 minutes · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

SDE-1 (fresher / early-career, Gurugram / Bengaluru)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-10 weeks · Cooldown: 6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Online Assessment (coding + CS fundamentals)

    Assessment · ~90-120 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: Maximal Square — Given a binary matrix of 0s and 1s, find the largest square containing only 1s and return its area. Interviewer expects the O(R*C) DP recurrence and edge-case discussion on paper.

  2. Round 1: Technical Round 1 — DSA + Project Deep-Dive + intro HLD

    Phone · ~60-90 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Restaurant Reopening Notification System — A restaurant reopens; Zomato must notify nearby users it is available again, but only after verifying that delivery partners are actually available in that geographic area. Design the event-driven flow (geofencing, delivery-partner availability check, fan-out to millions of users, dedup/throttle).

  3. Round 2: Technical Round 2 — DSA + System Design + Core CS

    System_design · ~60-90 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a Rate Limiter (LLD / machine coding) — Design and implement an in-process rate limiter with a clean interface (allowRequest(clientId)) supporting multiple strategies (token bucket, fixed window, sliding window). Focus on edge cases and memory optimization.

  4. Round 3: System Design / Backend Deep-Dive (longer loops)

    System_design · ~60-100 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a Shuffle Feature (Spotify-style / Shuffle Playlist) — Design a shuffle feature that plays items in a random order without repeats until the whole set is exhausted (and reshuffles fairly on repeat), backed by a correct uniform random-permutation approach. Discuss randint/Fisher-Yates and state handling.

  5. Round 4: Culture Fit — VP of Technology / leadership + compensation

    Behavioral · ~30 min · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

SDE-2 (experienced, Gurugram / Bengaluru)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~2 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-8 weeks · Cooldown: No published cooldown; not cited in reports.

  1. Round 0: Technical Round 1 — DSA + Work Discussion

    Onsite · ~60-90 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Maximum Sum Path in Two Arrays (switch at common elements) — Given two sorted arrays with distinct elements, traverse to maximize the sum; you may switch from one array to the other only at elements common to both. Return the maximum achievable sum. E.g. {2,3,7,10,12,15,30,34} and {1,5,7,8,10,15,16,17} -> 122.

  2. Round 1: System Design Round (HLD, sometimes + DSA)

    System_design · ~90 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design Twitter (post/view tweet, follow, news feed) — Design the core of Twitter: post a tweet, follow/unfollow users, and generate a user's news feed (recent tweets of followed users). Discuss data model, feed generation (pull vs push/fan-out), and scaling to hot users.

  3. Round 2: Culture Fit — Manager / leadership + compensation

    Behavioral · ~30-45 min · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

SDE-3 / Senior (Gurugram / Bengaluru)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~2-3 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-8 weeks · Cooldown: No published cooldown policy.

  1. Round 0: Pure Technical — DSA + LLD/Design + Fundamentals

    Onsite · ~60-90 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Design Zomato's Food-Delivery Platform (end-to-end HLD) — Design the end-to-end food-delivery system: restaurant search/discovery, order placement and lifecycle/state management, real-time order tracking, and the supporting data model and APIs. Drive scalability: caching, sharding, message queues, and hot-path bottlenecks for millions of orders.

  2. Round 1: System Design (HLD) — scalable architecture

    System_design · ~60-90 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design the Real-Time Delivery-Agent Assignment / Order-Dispatch System — Design the dispatch engine that assigns delivery partners to incoming orders in real time: geospatial matching of nearby available riders, batching, ETA estimation, and maximizing throughput/utilization while keeping assignment latency low at scale.

  3. Round 2: Engineering Manager / Co-CTO — culture + compensation

    Behavioral · ~30-45 min · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

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Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.