SDE 2 at Zomato

How it went

Their background

Round by round

1. 1

   Resume Discussion & System Design60 min

   The interview started with a conversation about my resume

   • The interviewer asked about my most challenging technical problems, major projects, and key contributions.

   • I walked through a couple of complex backend challenges I had solved and explained my approach clearly. System Design:

   • First design question: Design a secure multi-factor login system for a mobile banking app.

   • I explained user authentication flow, OTP generation, session management, and token expiration.

   • The interviewer asked me to look for edge cases, and I noticed the token expiry and refresh logic wasn’t foolproof.

   • This led to a discussion about rotating OTPs and implementing a secure refresh mechanism, which I was able to explain and design clearly.

   • At this point, the interviewer seemed impressed with my design thinking and problem-solving. DSA Surprise at the End

   • With 15 minutes left, the interviewer threw a tricky DSA question

   • Design a data structure to maintain a stream of integers that supports:

   • Insert an element

   • Delete an element

   • Get the median

   • Get a random element

   • All operations should be efficient (aim for O(log n) or O(1) where possible).

   • This last-minute problem was challenging, and I couldn’t optimize it completely in the limited time.

What came up