Zalando Senior Software Engineer interview questions

I interviewed for a backend senior software engineer role at Zalando, it started with a 30 minute intro call with a recruiter. If it goes well you are invited to a coding interview with a senior engineer. The coding challenge was more of a general coding task rather than Leetcode questions (which I personally preferred a lot). I found the coding interview really nice. If you pass you have a final round of system design and tech knowledge interview. For the system design interview, you should ask a lot of questions. What was different to me from other similar interviews is that your interviewer will not present the problem for you, instead let you know you can start and waiting for your questions. You have to start by reading a text of requirements and are faced with user stories to then design a system for. My experience here was decent, didn't get any positive connection with the interviewer which threw me a bit off my game, you can expect it to be right to the point. (Once again, there's a senior engineer interviewing you). I would say to ready yourself most with the final tech knowledge interview. You will have an engineering manager interviewing you here and it will be like a firing round of questions, the whole hour will be spent with you answering technical questions about topics related to the role. This interview is also very bland and I wasn't able to connect with the EM at all and get a feeling for what my potential future manager would be like. There was little room and a bit of a rush at the end to go ask your own questions to the EM as well. And here you are already exhausted by the amount of questions the EM will have asked you. The overall experience was above average, I feel like your experience will vary a bit depending on who is interviewing you. I had some great experiences at the start of the process while having less great towards the end.

It was a typical occurrence, nothing out of the ordinary. The interview followed immediately after the Codility test stage (2nd step), with the interviewer being a Senior Manager of a team at Zalando.