I applied through an employee referral. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Zalando (Dortmund) in Sept 2018
Interview
First Step was an online coding test via Codility. There were 3 algorithmic problems to solve which were fairly easy. You need to solve at least two to proceed to the next stage
Then an interview with recruiter was set up. The interview was mostly about my area of interest, previous experience and background check.
After that, I attended a 3-hour technical interview with 3 engineers [1 hour per interview, 1:1].
First one was about the problem I could not solve at Codility test.
The second one was about data structure and algorithms. A problem was given and I was asked about the corresponding data structure specific question while solving the problem. Third one was mostly about my area of interest and also some micro-service specific questions.
Interview questions [7]
Question 1
Find minimum number of words in a sentence, given a document, using white-space as separator for words and (!, ?, .) as the separator for sentence. There can be multiple white-spaces between two words.
Given an integer, re-arrange the integer such that first and last digit will be at first and second, second and second last digit will be at third and fourth position from left of the re-arranges integer and so on.
Example:
Input -> 12345678, Output -> 18273645
Input -> 1234567, Output -> 1726354
Given an array with n integers, check if it could become non-decreasing by removing at most 1 element.
Example:
Input: [3,2,4,3], Output: false
Input:[1, 4, 2, 3], Output: true
Input:[4, 3, 2], Output: false
Input:[1, 2, 3], Output: true
Determine whether a circular array with magic indexes contains a full circle. The array is circular in the sense that, the entry A[i] points to entry A[A[i]]. Full circle means it covers all the elements of the array. As a follow-up, I was asked to solve the problem in O(1) space.
Example:
Input: [2,3,1,4,0], Output: true
Input: [2,3,2,4,9], Output: false
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Zalando (Berlin) in Mar 2021
Interview
- first part was a HR call - all good
- second was a codility test - I waited for the weekend to do the test and before that I received an e-mail from a different recruiter than the one I was talking to initially asking me why I didn't finish it yet. It surprised me, because I already discussed this with my recruiter. Seems weird that the recruiters don't know about each other's actions. The codility challenge itself was fine, not very difficult.
- the next interview was a technical one, it was rescheduled once, and the second time the recruiter that was supposed to be there wasn't there, so they sent someone else. I'm guessing they didn't want to reschedule second time. It went fine, the questions were very general, about the way I work in my current position etc. Also at the end we tried to improve my codility solution.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- how is your team organised?
- what do you know about parallel programming?
First contact was from email and a call with the HR for initial informations and doubts about the process and then the second call that I had was with an engineer for the code test.
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Zalando (Dortmund) in Oct 2019
Interview
The process took 2 months. First I was given a programming test followed by an HR interview, later a live coding round with an engineering lead which went quite well.
In the Final round, there were back to back 3 interviews each of 1 hour in which first interview was taken by a Senior QA Lead with 0 technical questions, next one was a system design interview where I was given a problem to design a system related to Payment Gateway by a senior zalando engineer, in the last one I was asked to improve the solutions I submitted in the first round along with few javascript questions like - Difference between es5 and es6 this, why is nodejs asynchronous, what is callback hell.
Both technical interviews went quite well overall it was a very good experience, but I was vetoed by the QA Lead who never really asked me a single 'development' level question but all either culture or team-bonding related questions (like what would you do when a fellow developer interrupts you during your group discussions etc.). I can't quite understand why did they assign a testing executive to interview a backend developer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is callback hell ?
What is the difference between es5 and es6 this keyword ?
