Zepto | SDE 3 | Reject
Interview Experience
Background: 5+ YoE working @ investment bank
Round 1 LLD Round (Interviewvector) Ques: Design Online book reader (Kindle) Covered all FR, NFR, Classes, DB schema, API Design and Design Patterns Interview experience: Panel was easy...
Full Details
Background:
5+ YoE working @ investment bank
Round 1 LLD Round (Interviewvector)
Ques: Design Online book reader (Kindle)
Covered all FR, NFR, Classes, DB schema, API Design and Design Patterns
Interview experience: Panel was easy going, asked some good questions, I was able to answer all
Feedback: Positive
Round 2 HLD Round (Interviewvector)
Ques: Design Streaming service similar to Twitch
Discussed about FR, NFR, Estimation, High level Microservice, Database architecture
Interview experience: Panel was bad at communication but we managed. I was able to answer all follow up questions/deep dives.
Feedback: Positive
Round 3 HLD Round (Zepto EM)
Ques: Design Inventory Management System (for say KFC/McD)
Discussed about FR, NFR, Estimation, Core API\'s, High level Microservice, Database architecture
Interview experience: Good panel, asked some questions on concurrency, transactions & locks. Did some deep dive on MongoDB internal working. He was looking for specific jargons.
Feedback: Positive
Round 4 Hiring Manager Round (Zepto head of eng)
- LLD for WeWork (Only database schema)
- HLD of a project you worked on last 6 months
- Questions on Apache Kafka (current cluster is handling 10m requests per second, how do you scale to 1B)
- Questions on Postgres (internal workings)
- Languages worked with?
- Tell me about a time when a project you worked on went wrong
- Tell me about a time you had to give someone a critical feedback
- How do you make sure you write quality code
- Tell me about a time you learnt something outside of job
- Two things you love and hate about your current job
Interview experience: Panel was arrogant and unresponsive so it was hard to have a two way communication. He was nodding his head at times so I had to be happy with that. Interview went well, answered everything, yet got
rejected.
Feedback:
Rejected
About This Question
This is a candidate experience report from a twitch interview for a data eng role during the phone screen round reported in 2024.
It covers the following topics: Sql, Os, System Design, Oop, Behavioral .
Difficulty rating: Easy
Topics
About Twitch Interview Reports
This question was reported by a candidate who interviewed at Twitch. LeakCode aggregates interview reports from 10+ sources, including 1Point3Acres, Glassdoor, LeetCode Discuss, Blind, Reddit, Indeed, and Nowcoder. Each report is translated where necessary, deduplicated against existing entries, and tagged by company, role, round type, and reporting date.
Use this question as one calibration data point, not a memorization target. Companies typically rotate their question pools every 2-4 months; the exact wording of a 2024 question may differ from what you encounter today. The underlying pattern, difficulty level, and follow-up depth at Twitch are the higher-signal extractions to take from this report.
For broader preparation context, the Twitch interview process typically includes a recruiter screen, one or two technical phone screens, and a 4-5 round on-site loop covering coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral. Reports tagged on LeakCode show the round-by-round distribution and typical difficulty calibration. To browse questions filtered by round type and seniority, use the company hub linked above.
How To Practice This Type of Question
Solve similar problems on LeetCode under timed conditions (25-35 minutes per medium difficulty). The goal is pattern recognition: recognize the underlying technique (sliding window, two-pointer, BFS, memoized recursion, etc.) within 60-90 seconds of reading. Strong candidates verbalize their hypothesis out loud before coding, then iterate based on feedback. Weak candidates dive into implementation immediately, lose time on the wrong approach, and run out of time for follow-ups.
Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months. The exact wording of any given question may have been retired by the time you interview. Focus your prep on the pattern, not the specific problem. The patterns that appear in Twitch reports consistently are the ones worth investing in; one-off niche problems are not.
During Your Twitch Round
Apply the standard interview round template: clarify requirements (2-3 minutes), state your approach out loud and confirm direction with the interviewer (3-5 minutes), code with narration (15-25 minutes), test with concrete examples including edge cases (5 minutes), discuss optimization or trade-offs if time permits (5 minutes). This template is universally accepted across FAANG and adjacent companies; deviating from it produces weaker interviewer feedback signal.
The single most predictive failure mode in Twitch reports tagged "no hire": not asking clarifying questions. Interviewers are explicitly trained to weight this. Strong candidates ask 3-5 clarifying questions even on problems that look obvious; weak candidates dive into code immediately. The clarifying-question check is often the first signal recorded in the interviewer's written notes.