I cold-emailed the HR of Zomato in June and received a call from the HR for interviews in September. The whole process has 3 rounds, 2 technical interviews, and 1 Hiring Manager round
1st Technical Interview
The interview started with my introduction. The interviewer asked me about my projects and internship experience.
After that, the interviewer asked me some CS fundamental questions related to
- How does the chain of inheritance work? He told me to code a chain of inheritance with constructors and destructors and asked me to guess the output before running the program.
- Gave me a code with multiple fork statements in it and asked me to guess the outputs along with the number of processes
- Asked me about caching and how caching works at low level
After that, he asked me two DSA problems
- https://codeforces.com/problemset/problem/1593/E I started with explaining my algo, and dry ran my code in front of him. The interviewer seems satisfied with my approach. He asked me to code and told me that I was only allowed to run my code once. So he wanted me to write a bug-free code in one go
- https://codeforces.com/problemset/problem/1598/C
I explained my approach. We analyzed some corner cases. The interviewer again asked me to code this in 5 minutes without any errors 🫠. I guess he wanted to see if I could code under pressure
The interviewer seems happy with my performance
2nd Technical Interview
The interviewer introduced himself and then asked me what are my hobbies, where I was staying, and how was my college life. We had a chill discussion in the beginning and then he asked me for my formal introduction.
The interview started with a DBMS problem. The interviewer gave me 3 tables and asked me to write a query. I explained to him the logic but I couldn't write a SQL query because I had forgotten all the syntax.
He asked me for an example where Zomato is using OOPS.
He asked me some questions related to OS
- concurrency vs parallelism with examples
- how multi-threading works
- how threads are different from normal processes
- what are the different task scheduling algorithms and when to use what
- How to handle priorities while using multi-threading
He asked me a puzzle. I explained my approach by writing all my thoughts in the doc that he shared. He was expecting me to take more time but I came up with the solution pretty fast
He asked me 3 DSA problems in total.
- Longest Common Subsequence I explained to him my approach. He then asked me why couldn't we optimize it further from
O(n^2) .
Then he added another constraints that both the strings will have unique characters. I explained to him my approach with dp and segment tree which has complexityO(nlogn) . He seems happy with my approach - Asked me to implement Hash map from scratch. I designed a hash map with keys and values as integer. Then he asked me to modify my Hash map for strings. I explained about string hashing and he seemed happy. We then discussed about hash collision. Then he asked me to modify the code to make the hash map thread safe. I handled the same using mutex
- Painters partition I explained my approach. Since the time was running out, he asked me how much time would I take to code this up? I confidently told 10 minutes and I successfully coded it within the time limit
The interviewer seems happy with my performance
3rd Round
I was called to the Zomato HQ for this round. This was a chill pill round with one of the VPs of Zomato. We discussed Zomato culture, tech start-ups, my college days, the weather and the compensation structure.
Overall I liked Zomato's hiring process.