Interview Experience - 123 - Swiggy | Software Development Engineer III | L8
Summary
📌 Job Role: Software Development Engineer III
🔢 Number of Rounds: 6
📜 Offer Status: Accepted
📍 Location: Bangalore
👤 Candidate Name: Not disclosing due to signed NDA
Interview Process
Swiggy recruiter contacted me after receiving my resume from a third-party source.
Within a week, the first telephonic screening round was scheduled.
Each round lasted approximately 1 hour.
After clearing the screening round, five more interview rounds were conducted.
Once all the rounds were completed, a collective decision was made based on feedback.
The entire process spanned about a month.
Initially, I was offered an SDE2-high level role, but when I received an offer from Amazon, Swiggy revised it to an SDE3 offer.
Preparation Guide
Keep your intro short, impactful, and around 1 minute. Practice delivering it clearly.
Avoid using any questionable or ambiguous terms in your introduction to save time and avoid bias.
Refer to other interview experiences to build a broad perspective:
Interview Rounds
Round 1: Telephonic Screening Round
Duration: 60 minutes
Difficulty Level: Medium
Experience
The round started with a detailed introduction that lasted about 5 minutes. The interviewer then asked me to discuss the most challenging project I had worked on. There were several follow-up questions on the challenges, choices made, and lessons learned.
To be honest, I wasn’t very confident after this round, but I ended up getting shortlisted for the next set of rounds.
Key Learnings
Be ready to deep-dive into a past project. Choose one that has technical depth, and be prepared to discuss architectural decisions, trade-offs, and impact.
Round 2: Coding + CS Fundamentals
Duration: 60 minutes
Difficulty Level: Medium
Experience
The round began with some generic questions on deployment practices and Kafka, followed by two coding problems.
The questions included:
a. After releasing a story, if a particular API’s latency increased, what would you do? b. How do you ensure ordering in multiple Kafka partitions? c. A functional test case-related question (couldn't recall the exact one)
Then came the coding questions:
Longest subsequence of consecutive integers – typical medium-level array problem.
A linked list-based problem – can’t recall the exact problem, but it was medium difficulty and required good understanding of pointer manipulation.
Key Learnings
The round was a good mix of real-world engineering problems and algorithmic questions. Be prepared to handle Kafka and deployment-related questions along with standard DSA.
Round 3: Problem Solving + Data Structures
Duration: 60 minutes
Difficulty Level: Medium
Experience
The round started with a short introduction. Then I was asked to implement a JSON parser in Java that could convert a valid JSON string to a JSON object – similar to how Jackson works.
Example Input:
String input = "{{\"userId\": 1}, {\"name\": abc}}";
The focus was on parsing logic, error handling, and converting the string into a data structure.
In the last 5 minutes, there were a few questions about Swiggy’s on-call culture, how they handle production issues, etc.
Key Learnings
This was a solid problem-solving round that went beyond standard DSA. Practice implementing parsers and think in terms of building real components. Also, be familiar with company-specific practices like on-call rotations.
Round 4: Low-Level Design (LLD)
Duration: 60 minutes
Difficulty Level: Medium
Experience
This round again began with a brief 5-minute introduction. The problem was a low-level design scenario related to Swiggy’s serviceability, though I can’t recall the exact prompt.
The discussion involved object modeling, handling various states, and focusing on extensibility.
Key Learnings
Swiggy seems to emphasize design thinking that’s aligned with their business model. Understand their core use cases (delivery, availability, location-based serviceability) and prepare for company-specific scenarios.
Round 5: High-Level Design (HLD)
Duration: 60 minutes
Difficulty Level: Medium
Experience
After a quick 3-minute intro, the interviewer asked me to design a notification system for Swiggy to send promotional offer notifications.
We discussed topics such as:
Push notification architecture
User targeting
Scalability concerns
Rate limiting and retries
Queueing systems
Key Learnings
Be thorough with scalable architecture design, especially for notification and messaging systems. Cover async flow, retries, distributed queues, and eventual consistency.
Round 6: Hiring Manager (HM) Round
Duration: 60 minutes
Difficulty Level: Medium
Experience
The HM round began with a short introduction, followed by behavioral questions, mostly around leadership since this was for an SDE3 role.
We discussed:
Projects where I demonstrated ownership and initiative
Challenges faced while leading a team or driving a feature end-to-end
How I handle conflict or disagreement in technical decisions
Key Learnings
This was more of a culture-fit and behavioral evaluation. Have strong narratives around leadership, decision-making, and stakeholder management. Also, prepare to talk in STAR format for clarity.
Final Thoughts
Practice storytelling around your projects. SDE3-level interviews focus a lot on past ownership and depth of experience.
Swiggy’s process is balanced between system design and coding – prepare for both equally.
Kafka, deployment, and notification systems were recurring themes – be well-versed with them.
Use your Amazon or other offers strategically to negotiate levels if needed.