I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Zalando (Berlin) in Mar 2019
Interview
1. 2 tasks on Codility.
Both are trivial. You have 1.5 hours to complete them.
I completed both in 15 minutes with 100% scoring for the first one and around 60% for the second one (due to failed performance tests).
2. Call with HR about general stuff.
3. Technical interview about Codility tasks.
Interviewers are medium and junior developers.
They started an interview with asking personal questions that don't relate to work and interview. When I replied that is not their business, they tried to ask them again several times.
Example of such questions "How did you set status in your LinkedIn profile?", "What do you think of a person telling you he uses Agile?".
They read HR blogs that offtopic questions can help to open the person to the interviewer but they did that in the worst possible way. I felt very surprised and sad with their pushy style of diving into my personal life.
Then we moved to my Codility tasks. The whole idea is to discuss how we can make a solution better.
I replied that I completed this task in 15 minutes and had more than an hour to clean it if I felt it was required. I completed it in a state that I feel is good, so there is nothing to improve.
They ignored this (probably didn't understand; they did this several times during our talk) and repeated their request again. I replied the same. They repeated request again.
I found that they don't listen to me at all and follow some checklist without thinking at all.
Interviewers asked several times what is the worst complexity of HashMap. Several times because my answer was out of their vision of possible answers, even if it was correct :-)
After 2-3 rounds of ping pong, I explained how worst complexity can be achieved and how not to have it. Only after that they stopped repeating the same question.
So providing an answer to the question wasn't enough. Their checklist assumed a detailed answer, but they didn't care asking for this.
During this talk they suggested some "improvements" to my code that don't relate to code at all and only break it. I didn't pay attention to this and simply ignored them knowing already with whom I have a talk.
Since one of the tasks had performance tests failed, I mentioned what is a bottleneck in the beginning of our talk. They didn't believe me and we spent about 20 minutes diving deeper into their usual ping pong with same questions and came to my initial words about bottleneck.
In the end of the interview they asked why my face is not happy. I said that is not a scope of this interview, for some reason they didn't start their ping pong with repeating this question until they receive another answer.
Well, I spent 1 hour helping not experienced and not clever people to interview me, why I should look happy.
Then they said how much they like this interview - it was very hard not to laugh for me.
It was hard to finish this interview and not to cancel it. Lots of stupidity and offensive behaviour.
Zalando trains its developers to perform interviews. It's very sad they do this using real people as interviewee. Normally companies do this by using experienced interviewer and a junior one, not to make interviewee experience such issues.
Since they do this, they pay with their reputation for such learning sessions.
intial call with recruiter and then a coding assessment test. coding was leetcode medium level questions. after that was a live coding interview. for approx 1 hour and then a systems design interview for designing a payment system.
The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Zalando (Berlin) in Oct 2025
Interview
The interviewer was looking desperately tired and unfocused. Didn't join the interview on time. I had to find someone else to ping him to join.
The questions were generic and related. However, it took 2 weeks for the interviewer to send the results of a basic questionnaire to move forward.
I was overall hugely disappointed with that.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you ensure the application you are working on meets the performance requirements?
The interview process id extremely time consuming. It has technical coding and general interview questions. The interviews may vary from team to team. The information is around four year old.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Many things, previous employer. Future plans. Coding