Zalando Senior Software Engineer interview questions

The interview process is very lengthy and takes more than one month. Round 1: screen by hr where they will go through your resume and check your skillset matches the role Round 2: Codality test where 3 problems will be provided- fix error in code, 2 leet code medium problem Round 3(Tech manager screening): tech manager round- it was like a rapid-fire round, the interviewer asked more than 30+ questions in 1 hour. question- CAP theorem, ACID, NoSql vs SQL, how to handle transactions, event-driven architecture, how ci/cd pipeline works, k8 basics, Kafka basics, thread basics, Rest architecture, OOPs concepts, Singleton, design patterns used in projects, objects of abstract class can be created? Round 4(SSE Screening): String pool, immutability, GC, hashmap internals, problem-solving -> merge two sorted lists, the internal implementation of ArrayList Round 5(SSE Screening): JPA, annotations used in JPA, hibernate annotations, @Transaction, how to do transactions between 3 microservices, functional interfaces, used any functional interface, streams, CAP theorem, what is latency and how to reduce it, what all ways are available to communicate between two microservices, basic inheritance question--> can we implement multiple interfaces, is it possible to extend multiple abstract classes, when you will prefer to use an interface and when you will use an abstract class. Round 6 (System design round): Streaming service.I had designed it for a large scale.Interviewer asked me if the additional service can be removed which i was using to do some very specific tasks can be removed. which I removed after picking the hint which was provided to me by the interviewer. you will not get any feedback in between rounds. in my case, I got it after the 6th round with Negative feedback round 6, in which I changed my initial design after getting a hint from the interviewer which contradicted my earlier design. I was completely shocked after seeing this feedback and was thinking about whether it would have been better if I had ignored his hint. The process is too lengthy and time-consuming for getting such weird feedback. I will suggest if you're giving an interview for Zalando use it as a launchpad for other interviews.

Interview process is not ethical at all. As a first step you have to solve a coding assessment in Codility. After that HR arrange a technical interview. In that step Technical Manager sees your CV for the first time. If he doesn't like your CV, both of you waste 1 hour for nothing. My interview process: - First I passed the 2.5 hours coding assessment in Codility. - Interviewer believed that I'm not a good fit because recently I founded a startup and closed my company. I started with that question without any icebreakers. He asked irrelevant questions to make the interview harder for me. He even asked me a question about his academic paper which is totally unethical. It is obvious that interviewer already made his mind before interviewing me. Interview was a waste of time for me and for him. If he reviewed my CV as soon as I applied he would reject me. I solved the coding challenge in Codility for nothing.