Zomato, whose parent company renamed itself Eternal in 2025 and also runs Blinkit, hires software engineers mainly in Gurugram. Candidate reports describe short, DSA-led loops with a low-level design round and a culture or managerial round that probes ownership. This page covers what Zomato builds and who it hires, the process candidates commonly report, the technical depth the teams care about, representative problem types, what interviewers score, and a three-week prep plan.
What Zomato builds and who it hires
Zomato's engineers build food ordering and delivery, restaurant tools, ads, and the platforms underneath them. Engineers have spoken publicly about moving Zomato's logging from Elasticsearch to ClickHouse at a peak of about 150 million log lines a minute, and an AWS blog co-written with Zomato engineers describes moving the billing platform from TiDB to DynamoDB. Go is used in several services, such as an ML API gateway.
- SDE-1: campus and off-campus graduates.
- SDE-2 and above: back-end engineers, often in Go.
- Front-end and mobile engineers: consumer and restaurant apps.
- Data and ML engineers: recommendations and delivery-time prediction.
What the process tends to look like
| Stage | What happens | How to prepare |
|---|---|---|
| Recruiter call or referral | Role, level (SDE-1, SDE-2 or SDE-3), team and timeline | Know the product, the team and your own résumé in detail |
| Online test (campus and off-campus) | Timed DSA problems | Medium problems, plus core CS questions for some drives |
| Technical rounds | Commonly two rounds, each with one or two DSA problems and project questions | Graphs, topological sort, heaps and sliding windows |
| LLD or HLD | A design round, such as a restaurant menu system | Entities, APIs and how the design scales |
| Culture or managerial round | Ownership, pace and user-centric thinking, sometimes with a senior leader | Stories about owning a production problem |
Processes differ by team, level and office and change over time, so treat this as the common shape candidates report and confirm the specifics with your recruiter.
DSA, LLD and food delivery at scale
DSA with follow-ups. Reports mention graph problems such as topological sort alongside arrays and strings. Interviewers push on complexity and on why your approach is correct.
Go and concurrency. Some back-end candidates report questions such as mutex versus channels and read-write locks in Go. If the role lists Go, review goroutines, channels, the sync package and context cancellation.
Data at scale. Zomato's public talks on logging and billing make useful preparation: write-heavy pipelines, choosing a store for the access pattern, and controlling cost when traffic peaks on events such as New Year's Eve.
Representative problem types
These are the kinds of problems candidates describe, not a leaked question list. Practice the category, not the exact question.
- Design a restaurant menu system with variants and add-ons.
- Order tasks with dependencies using topological sort.
- Design a pipeline that ingests very high volumes of logs.
- Design a billing system for restaurant partners.
- Implement a concurrent worker pool in Go.
- Rank restaurants by distance, rating and delivery time.
- Medium sliding-window and heap problems.
What interviewers score
- Working code: a solution that runs, handles edge cases and is readable by the next engineer.
- Practical judgment: the trade-offs you name and the simplest design that meets the requirement.
- Product sense: understanding who the user is and what failure looks like for them.
- Ownership: examples where you shipped, measured and fixed things yourself.
The behavioral side
Technical rounds decide most outcomes, but every Zomato loop also asks about how you work. Prepare a short story for each of these, with a result and what you learned:
- Something you shipped end to end. Cover the user problem, your decisions, what you measured and what you would change.
- A disagreement with a teammate. Show how you made the decision on evidence and kept the relationship.
- Why this company? Connect its product and engineering problems to the work you want to do next.
Structures and sample answers for the common questions are in our software engineer behavioral answers guide.
A three-week prep plan
- Week 1: practical coding: build small features against an API, parse and transform data, and write tests, in the language you will interview in.
- Week 2: system design for the company's domain, plus two behavioral stories about shipping and fixing something under pressure.
- Week 3: timed mixed problems, a mock interview every other day, and research into the product and its engineering blog.
For practice lists, use LeetCode company-tagged questions, the Striver A2Z sheet or the Love Babbar 450 sheet, and if your drive starts with a test, read our guide to new-grad online assessments.
Where CoPilot Interview fits
Most of a Zomato loop is spoken: you explain an approach, defend a trade-off and talk through your past work. CoPilot Interview is an AI interview assistant whose free AI mock interview builds technical and behavioral questions from your résumé and the job description, reads them aloud and scores each spoken answer out of ten, so you can rehearse the explanation as well as the code. The free plan gives 15 minutes a day of live help in sessions of up to 15 minutes, with AI mock interviews included. Online assessments and many coding rounds forbid outside help, so practice beforehand and follow your employer's rules on the day.
Disclosure: CoPilot Interview is our product, so weigh what we say about it accordingly.
Frequently asked questions
What programming language should I use in a Zomato interview?
Use your strongest language for DSA rounds. Many back-end teams work in Go, so Go roles may include Go-specific questions.
Does Zomato send an online assessment?
Campus and off-campus drives usually start with an online test; experienced hires more often start with a recruiter call. Confirm with your recruiter.
Do I need to know Go for a Zomato interview?
Not for most DSA rounds, where you can usually pick your language. But Go appears in several Zomato services and some back-end candidates report Go-specific questions on mutexes and channels, so learn its concurrency basics if the job description mentions it.
How should I prepare for Zomato coding questions?
Practice practical problems under time limits, build small features against an API in your interview language, and prepare one system design in Zomato's domain. Explain every solution out loud, because follow-up questions about trade-offs matter as much as the first answer.
Can I use AI tools in a Zomato interview?
Only if the instructions you receive say so. Online assessments and live coding rounds generally forbid outside help, and some companies now state their AI policy in the invitation. Use AI to practice beforehand, and follow your employer's rules.
Practice this interview before the real one
The AI mock interview builds questions from your resume and the job description, reads them aloud and scores each spoken answer out of 10. Included on the free plan.
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