Swiggy
Leading Indian food delivery aggregator with complex real-time logistics.
4 Rounds
~15 Days
Hard
The Interview Loop
Recruiter Screen (30 min)
Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.
Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)
Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.
Interview Question Bank
Cloud Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you handled a major production incident. Walk me through your exact steps from the moment the pager went off to the post-mortem.
#Incident Response
#Communication
#Post-mortem
Cloud Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you made a mistake that caused a production outage. How did you handle it, and what did you learn?
#Accountability
#Learning
#Incident Management
Cloud Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
At Swiggy, developers sometimes push back against security policies, asking for full admin access to production to debug faster. How do you handle this pushback?
#Communication
#Security
#Empathy
Cloud Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Describe a project where you significantly reduced cloud infrastructure costs. What was your approach?
#Cost Optimization
#Initiative
#Cloud Architecture
Cloud Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Terraform module to provision an S3 bucket that enforces Swiggy's compliance rules: it must be private, encrypted at rest with KMS, and have versioning enabled.
#Terraform
#AWS S3
#KMS
Cloud Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Bash or Python script to find all unattached EBS volumes in an AWS region and delete them if they have been unattached for more than 7 days.
#Python
#Boto3
#AWS EBS
#Automation
Cloud Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Write a shell command or short script to parse an Nginx access log file and output the top 10 IP addresses that made the most requests.
#Bash
#Linux
#Log Parsing
#Awk
Cloud Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Python script using Boto3 to list all AWS IAM users who have access keys older than 90 days and output them to a CSV file.
#Python
#Boto3
#AWS IAM
#Security
Cloud Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Bash or Python script that takes a list of 100 Swiggy API endpoints, checks their HTTP status concurrently, and prints only the ones that return a non-200 status.
#Python
#Concurrency
#Bash
#Networking
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a multi-region active-active architecture on AWS for Swiggy's core order management system to ensure high availability during a regional outage.
#AWS
#Global Accelerator
#DynamoDB Global Tables
#Route53
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a monitoring and alerting setup using Prometheus and Grafana to track the latency of Swiggy delivery partner location updates.
#Prometheus
#Grafana
#Metrics
#SLIs/SLOs
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design the cloud infrastructure for Swiggy Instamart's real-time inventory system. It needs to handle high read/write throughput and ensure items aren't oversold.
#AWS
#Redis
#Kafka
#Databases
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a rate-limiting service at the API Gateway level to protect Swiggy's backend services from abuse or DDoS attacks during New Year's Eve.
#Rate Limiting
#API Gateway
#Redis
#Algorithms
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Swiggy uses Kafka extensively for event streaming (e.g., order state changes). How do you architect a highly available Kafka cluster across multiple Availability Zones?
#Kafka
#High Availability
#Zookeeper/KRaft
#AWS
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a CDN and caching strategy to serve millions of restaurant menus and food images with ultra-low latency across India.
#CDN
#CloudFront
#Caching
#S3
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an auto-scaling strategy for background worker nodes that allocate delivery partners to orders, based on the backlog of orders in an SQS queue.
#AWS SQS
#Auto Scaling
#KEDA
#Kubernetes
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you manage Terraform state in a multi-developer environment, and what happens if two engineers try to apply changes to Swiggy's infrastructure simultaneously?
#Terraform
#AWS S3
#DynamoDB
#State Locking
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
Walk me through the strategy you would use to upgrade an Amazon EKS cluster running hundreds of Swiggy microservices with zero downtime.
#Kubernetes
#EKS
#Zero Downtime
#Node Groups
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
During an IPL final, Swiggy experiences a massive traffic spike. You notice a sudden surge of 5xx errors on an Application Load Balancer. How do you troubleshoot and resolve this?
#AWS ALB
#CloudWatch
#Auto Scaling
#Networking
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How would you implement IAM least privilege for a new Swiggy Instamart microservice running on EKS that needs access to a specific S3 bucket and DynamoDB table?
#AWS IAM
#IRSA
#EKS
#Security
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Swiggy's AWS bill is growing rapidly. What strategies would you implement to optimize costs for our EC2 and EKS workloads without impacting performance?
#Cost Optimization
#Spot Instances
#Karpenter
#Graviton
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
Explain how you would handle a split-brain scenario in a distributed caching system like Redis, which Swiggy uses heavily for session management and menu caching.
#Redis
#Distributed Systems
#High Availability
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
We have multiple AWS accounts for different Swiggy environments (Dev, QA, Prod) and business units. Would you use VPC Peering or AWS Transit Gateway to connect them, and why?
#AWS VPC
#Transit Gateway
#Network Architecture
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
A developer pings you saying their Kubernetes pod is stuck in a CrashLoopBackOff state. Walk me through the exact kubectl commands and steps you would use to debug this.
#Kubernetes
#Debugging
#kubectl
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Design a modern GitOps CI/CD pipeline for a Golang microservice at Swiggy using tools like GitLab CI, Docker, and ArgoCD.
#GitOps
#ArgoCD
#Docker
#Pipelines
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
For Swiggy's core checkout service, would you recommend a Blue/Green deployment or a Canary deployment? Explain how you would implement your choice in Kubernetes.
#Kubernetes
#Canary
#Blue/Green
#Istio
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you securely manage and inject secrets (like database passwords and API keys) into Kubernetes pods without hardcoding them in Git?
#Kubernetes
#Secrets Management
#HashiCorp Vault
#AWS Secrets Manager
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
If a new deployment causes a severe memory leak in production, how do you ensure the system automatically rolls back to the previous stable version?
#Kubernetes
#Argo Rollouts
#Prometheus
#Automated Rollback
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Swiggy engineers are complaining about 'alert fatigue' because they receive hundreds of PagerDuty alerts daily that resolve themselves. How do you fix this?
#Alerting
#SRE
#Incident Management
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
An order placed on Swiggy touches 15 different microservices. How do you implement distributed tracing to find out exactly which service is causing a 3-second delay?
#Distributed Tracing
#OpenTelemetry
#Jaeger
#Microservices
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you secure Swiggy's internal microservices so they can communicate with each other, but cannot be accessed directly from the public internet?
#VPC
#Private Subnets
#Security Groups
#Service Mesh
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
You notice that an AWS RDS PostgreSQL read replica is experiencing high replication lag, causing stale data on the Swiggy app. How do you troubleshoot this?
#AWS RDS
#PostgreSQL
#Replication
#Troubleshooting
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
If we use DynamoDB to store user order history, how would you design the Partition Key and Sort Key to efficiently query a user's last 10 orders?
#DynamoDB
#Data Modeling
#NoSQL
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
Several microservices in our EKS cluster are randomly failing to resolve internal DNS names. How do you troubleshoot CoreDNS performance issues?
#Kubernetes
#CoreDNS
#Networking
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
Explain how you would implement mutual TLS (mTLS) between microservices in a Kubernetes cluster using Istio, and how you would verify it is working.
#Kubernetes
#Istio
#mTLS
#Service Mesh
Difficulty Radar
Based on recent AI-sourced data.
Meet Your Interviewers
The "Standard" Interviewer
Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
SimulateUnwritten Rules
Think Out Loud
Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.