SDE-1 at Zomato

How it went

What they would tell you

How to prepare

Their background

Round by round

1. 1

   DSA I90 min

   The first round was a healthy mix of resume discussion and coding. My interviewer started with probing questions on my past internships and projects, really wanting to uncover my thought process and decision-making: not just "what" I did, but "why" and "how." Then came two DSA problems: Optimised Array Traversal: The focus was on converting a naïve solution into O(n) time, especially without using extra space, basically showing your understanding of in-place algorithms. Minimum Subarray for Target Sum: Given a list of positive integers (possibly repeated) and a target, return the smallest length of a contiguous subarray whose sum is at least the target. Just as I finished this, the interviewer then threw in a twist: "How would it change if the array also had negative numbers?" This opened up a discussion about algorithm tweaks and limitations.

   • Minimum Subarray for Target Sum
2. 2

   DSA II and Core90 min

   This session was far more subject-focused, largely because my resume included OS projects and some console based application. The conversation quickly started into system concepts like memory management, scheduling, maybe even concurrency. When the DSA question came, it was based on BST traversal logic with an emphasis on clean code and thorough test cases. We covered how the solution behaves for edge cases, like skewed binary search trees or when negative values appear as node values.

3. 3

   Culture Fit & Values50 min

   The interviewer wanted to understand what motivates me, why Zomato specifically interests me, and how I handle real-world challenges at work. There were plenty of questions around my previous experiences, how I deal with setbacks or conflicts, and times I showed tenacity or creativity. The key was to see whether my mindset and values matched what Zomato looks for in its engineers.

What came up