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
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to optimize a slow-running data pipeline. What was the root cause and the impact?
#Performance Tuning
#Impact
#Problem Solving
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a situation where you disagreed with a product manager or data scientist about a data metric definition. How did you resolve it?
#Communication
#Conflict Resolution
#Stakeholder Management
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time your pipeline failed in production and caused a data outage or incorrect metrics. What did you do?
#Incident Management
#Ownership
#Post-mortems
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given a list of delivery partner active hours as intervals [start_time, end_time], write a function to merge all overlapping intervals to find the total active duration.
#Arrays
#Sorting
#Intervals
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Python script to parse a deeply nested JSON payload representing a complex Swiggy order (multiple items, add-ons, taxes) and flatten it into a tabular format.
#Python
#JSON Parsing
#Recursion
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given a massive web server log file, write a script to find the top 10 IP addresses making requests to the checkout API.
#File I/O
#Hash Maps
#Heaps
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Implement a rate limiter using the Token Bucket algorithm to throttle incoming API requests from restaurant POS systems.
#Object-Oriented Programming
#Concurrency
#System Design
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Write a program to find the shortest delivery route for a delivery executive given a grid with obstacles, a starting point, a restaurant location, and a customer location.
#Graphs
#BFS
#Pathfinding
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given an array of integers representing daily order counts, write a function to find the maximum sum of a contiguous subarray (Kadane's Algorithm).
#Arrays
#Dynamic Programming
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time dashboard pipeline for Swiggy's restaurant partners to see live orders and daily earnings.
#Real-time Analytics
#Kafka
#Stream Processing
#Databases
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design the data pipeline for Swiggy Instamart's real-time inventory management system.
#Event Sourcing
#Data Consistency
#Architecture
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a surge pricing data model and pipeline that updates delivery fees every 2 minutes based on demand and supply.
#Micro-batching
#Geospatial Data
#Machine Learning Pipelines
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a data lake architecture for Swiggy to store and query historical geospatial data (delivery partner pings).
#Data Lake
#AWS S3
#Partitioning
#File Formats
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
How would you design a deduplication system for clickstream events coming from the Swiggy app?
#Deduplication
#Bloom Filters
#Stream Processing
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Write a SQL query to find the top 3 restaurants by order volume in each city for the last 30 days.
#Window Functions
#Aggregations
#Ranking
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
Given an orders table, write a SQL query to calculate the 7-day rolling average of order values for each user.
#Window Functions
#Time Series
#Moving Averages
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
Write a query to find delivery partners who have delivered more than 5 orders consecutively without any cancellations.
#Gaps and Islands
#Window Functions
#Conditional Logic
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
For Swiggy Instamart, write a query to find items that went out of stock within 1 hour of being restocked.
#Self Joins
#Datetime Manipulation
#Event Logs
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you handle data skewness in Spark when joining a massive 'orders' table with a smaller 'restaurants' table?
#Apache Spark
#Performance Tuning
#Data Skew
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
Explain the difference between repartition() and coalesce() in Spark. When would you use which in a daily batch pipeline?
#Apache Spark
#Partitioning
#Shuffling
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How does Spark handle memory management? Explain the difference between execution memory and storage memory.
#Apache Spark
#Memory Architecture
#Internals
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
You have a Spark job failing with an OutOfMemory (OOM) error. Walk me through your debugging steps.
#Apache Spark
#Troubleshooting
#OOM
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What is Adaptive Query Execution (AQE) in Spark 3.0, and how would it benefit Swiggy's ETL workloads?
#Apache Spark
#AQE
#Optimization
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
How do you ensure exactly-once processing in a Kafka to Spark Streaming pipeline for payment transactions?
#Apache Kafka
#Spark Streaming
#Exactly-Once Semantics
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What happens if a Kafka consumer fails? How are offsets managed and reassigned?
#Apache Kafka
#Consumer Groups
#Fault Tolerance
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How would you handle a sudden spike in order events (e.g., during IPL finals) causing severe Kafka consumer lag?
#Apache Kafka
#Scaling
#Monitoring
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
Explain how watermarks work in Apache Flink and how you would use them to handle late-arriving delivery status events.
#Apache Flink
#Streaming
#Event Time
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you design an Airflow DAG to handle backfilling of 6 months of historical order data without overloading the production database?
#Apache Airflow
#Backfilling
#Database Load
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain how you would handle a scenario in Airflow where a downstream task needs to wait for multiple asynchronous external APIs to finish.
#Apache Airflow
#Sensors
#Asynchronous Tasks
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Design a dimensional model (Star Schema) for Swiggy's food delivery business. Identify the facts and dimensions.
#Star Schema
#Fact Tables
#Dimension Tables
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How would you handle slowly changing dimensions (SCD Type 2) for a restaurant's menu prices in your data warehouse?
#SCD Type 2
#Data Warehousing
#ETL
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
Explain how you would optimize Amazon S3 storage costs for Swiggy's massive volume of delivery proof images and application logs.
#AWS S3
#Cost Optimization
#Lifecycle Policies
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
How do you securely manage database credentials and API keys in your data pipelines?
#Secret Management
#AWS Secrets Manager
#Airflow Connections
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
Write a SQL query to find the percentage of users who placed a second order within 7 days of their first order.
#Cohort Analysis
#Self Joins
#Window Functions
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you ensure data quality and validate data before it is consumed by downstream machine learning models for Swiggy's recommendation engine?
#Data Validation
#Great Expectations
#Anomaly Detection
Difficulty Radar
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