Swiggy and Zomato Engineering Interview Questions 2026: Hyperlocal Tech, System Design, and Food-Tech Domain

Swiggy SDE interview process 2026:

1. Resume screen: 2+ years of product company experience for SDE-2. IIT/NIT or strong projects for freshers. Swiggy values candidates with experience in high-scale real-time systems. Engineering roles are based in Bangalore (primary), Hyderabad, and Pune.

2. Online Assessment (60-90 minutes): 2 coding problems (LeetCode medium-hard). Swiggy's OA often includes a logistics or delivery-related context (e.g., 'given N restaurant locations and M delivery partner locations, assign partners to orders to minimise total delivery time').

3. Technical Coding Rounds (2 rounds, 60 minutes each): LeetCode medium-hard. Common topics at Swiggy: - Graphs: shortest path for delivery routing (Dijkstra, BFS/DFS, topological sort) - Priority queues: order assignment to nearest available delivery partner - Sliding window and prefix sums: real-time demand forecasting window - Trees: hierarchical catalogue (category > restaurant > dish)

4. System Design Round (SDE-2+): 'Design Swiggy's real-time order tracking system for the customer' 'Design the restaurant discovery and search experience for 40M users' 'Design Instamart's 10-minute delivery slot and inventory management' 'Design a notification system for food orders (order placed, being prepared, out for delivery, delivered)'

5. Engineering culture round: Swiggy values: thinking from first principles (understand the problem before jumping to a solution), ownership (end-to-end responsibility; you own the bug on Friday night, not just your ticket), and user empathy (decisions guided by what creates the best experience for the hungry user waiting for food).

Salary at Swiggy (2024-25): SDE-1: 18-28 LPA. SDE-2: 28-50 LPA. Senior SDE: 50-90 LPA TC including performance bonus.

Zomato SDE interview process 2026:

1. Resume screen: Zomato values candidates with scale experience. The engineering team handles 10M+ daily orders across Zomato food delivery and Blinkit combined. Zomato also has engineering roles in Noida/Gurugram in addition to Bangalore.

2. Online Assessment (60 minutes): 2 coding problems (LeetCode medium-hard). Zomato's OA is known for being more concise than competitors: 2 problems in 60 minutes vs the more common 2 in 90 minutes.

3. Technical Coding Rounds (2-3 rounds, 45-60 minutes each): LeetCode medium-hard. Zomato also asks practical implementation questions within coding rounds: 'Implement a rate limiter for Zomato's restaurant partner API using a sliding window counter in Redis.'

4. System Design Round (SDE-2+): 'Design Zomato's restaurant recommendation engine' 'Design a real-time driver location tracking system for 500K concurrent delivery partners' 'Design Blinkit's inventory management system for 300 darkstores' 'Design Zomato's review and rating system with fraud detection'

5. HR/culture round: Zomato has a distinct culture (fast-paced, high ownership, 'move fast and eat things'). They look for candidates comfortable with ambiguity, able to make decisions with incomplete information, and genuinely passionate about consumer problems at scale.

Salary at Zomato (2024-25): SDE-1: 20-30 LPA. SDE-2: 30-55 LPA. Senior SDE: 55-95 LPA TC.

Food-tech system design deep-dives:

1. 'Design a real-time order-to-delivery-partner assignment system for Swiggy.' Core components: - Order placement API: creates order in state PLACED, publishes to assignment queue - Delivery partner availability service: tracks each partner's GPS location, current order load, and availability status in Redis (10-second TTL for location; immediate update on status change) - Assignment algorithm: find available partners within a configurable radius of the restaurant (start with 2 km; expand in 500m steps if none found). Score each partner by estimated time to reach the restaurant (Dijkstra on the road graph with real-time traffic weights from HERE or Google Maps Platform). Assign to the lowest-ETA available partner - Idempotency: each order assigned exactly once; use a distributed lock (Redis SETNX or Redlock) on the order ID during assignment - Reassignment: if the assigned partner rejects, goes offline, or is unresponsive for 60 seconds: re-run the assignment algorithm; escalate to support after 3 failed assignments

2. 'Design Blinkit's inventory management system for 300 darkstores.' Core components: - Product catalog service: each product has a master SKU; darkstores carry a subset of SKUs based on local demand - Per-darkstore inventory ledger: each SKU at each darkstore has a real-time stock count; deducted on order creation (reserve), confirmed on pick completion, released on order cancellation - Stock-out prevention: alert when inventory falls below a reorder threshold; automatic purchase order to the warehouse supplier - Demand forecasting: predict which SKUs will sell out in the next 4 hours based on: historical sales by hour/day/location, current order rate (is today above the historical average?), and local events (IPL match evening: increased snack/drinks demand) - Consistency: inventory deductions must be atomic (avoid overselling); use Redis DECRBY with a Lua script or database transactions for stock deductions