I applied online. I interviewed at Zalando (Helsinki, Südfinnland) in Jul 2020
Interview
A long process comprising from 4 different stages:
I applied online to the position for Heliniski office, got contacted by a recruiter a few days after. it was a general chat about my experience, interest in the position, company and the relocation. the recruiter was happy and sent me a link for online test on codibility(am not sure if this was the platform they used). The test included 3 questions 2 easy and 1 mid, keep in mind this test assess the performance and correctness of the code for the final score and only will be run once. You will get a sample test so check it beforehand.
- the technical manager interview which lasts for an hour covers a wide range of topics such as Microservices, Databases, Distributed systems and similar to the questions mentioned in the interview questions.
- the final onsite interview was online, 4 hours with an hour break, the interviewers were friendly and easy to talk to. One interview for the system design to read Kafka stream into a corpus for ML team. the second was the coding for a histogram which was very easy and the last step was general tech about different topics focused on stream processing using kafka, spark and flink.
I got a feedback after a week with a rejection with a detailed feedback on what I lacked for this position which was mainly the CI/CD experience and monitoring for pipelines though this was not a requirement and i was not able to come with a good design for the design question.
After passing the first stage
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
-Interest in Company
- previous experience
- 3 online coding exam with 2 focused on string manipulation and one for bit manipulation the final score depend on the performance of the code and the correctness.
- The engineering manager questions focused on Microservices, databases, normal distribution in leyman terms and question similar to the ones mentioned in the interview questions here.
- merge kafka streams into a datastore for the machine learning team to read
- histogram code
- general questions about Kafka such as backward, forward compatibility, flink, storm, parquet format, spark basic datatypes and why they are used and previous. experience
1. Online Application & CV Screening
You submit your application via Zalando’s career portal. Recruiters review your resume against the role’s requirements.
Zalando Jobs
2. Initial HR / Talent Acquisition Call (30–45 min)
Purpose:
Learn about your background and motivation.
Discuss why you’re applying to Zalando and your expectations (including salary range).
You can ask high-level questions about the company and team.
This is usually a video or phone call with a Talent Acquisition Partne
It was hr meeting 15min. Asked about my experiences, and than 3 more questions. She was on time and everything such as planning was easy. It was only first step but its moving fast and I liked it.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Why would you select Zalando if you had another company at the same time?
It went well, everyone was nice, I would recommend applying there. Lots of interesting positions but it depends upon which team you apply for, I will try an other time.