How I cleared Zeta Interview?

(Sep 2021) In this blog , I will be telling you about all the questions asked in Zeta interview and the learnings that I get from this interview.

How I get an interview invite from Zeta

Basically, I applied to Zeta Suite from the LinkedIn Jobs portal, as my prior experience was matching with the Zeta, So after few days, I got a call from Zeta HR for the interview, She asked me my current tech stack and given brief about Zeta Suite interview process (“Basically there is three-round for SDE-2 profile and each round is an elimination round, following is the brief about the rounds”).

1. Problem-solving.
2. Low-Level design.
3. Cultural fit.

1. First round of interviews (Problem-solving)

In this round, Basically, the interviewer asked me to give a basic introduction and past experiences and projects, I explained my projects very well. Then he shared me codeshare link and added a DS question in it.

This question was basically a https://leetcode.com/problems/climbing-stairs/(climbing-stairs), that most of the guys would be able to solve, I would recommend you guys to try to solve this question once.

I gave a recursive solution to the interviewer and the interview told me to dry run the code with a basic input. I explained the question to him very well. Then he asked me about the time complexity of the code. As you know, the solution is solved by recursion so time complexity would be more. I just thought for a little bit and told him O(2 pow n) which was correct. Basically, he told me to optimize it. I told him two solutions upfront.

1. Recursive DP.
2. Iterative DP.

He basically code both the solutions and I wrote the code for both and explained him very well. If you want to go through all the three solutions to this problem then you can go through this blog.

Climbing stairs leetcode problem

After one day, I got a call from HR, that I have cleared the first round and after 2 days I scheduled 2nd round of interviews.

2. Second round of interview: Low-level design round.

In this round, the Interviewer shared a google doc link in the chat window and there is one design question given in the document that is basically a cab sharing app design like OLA/UBER. There were some basic requirements given for this design and expectations were to design the database entities and relations among them, and as well as write the code to demonstrate some of the functionalities given in the document.

This is the exact question that was asked in the interview.

Problem Statement:

We want to build a cab booking platform to allow a rider to book a cab.

Details:

The location is represented as a (x, y) coordinate.

Distance between two points (x1, y1) and(x2, y2) is sqrt((x1-x2)² + (y1-y2)²)

Platform has decided upon maximum distance a driver has to travel to pickup a rider.

A cab has only 1 driver.

Sharing of cab is not allowed between riders

There is a single type of cab

Please build an application that exposes following features to riders and drivers.

1. Register a rider.

2. Register a driver/cab

3. Update a cab’s location

4. A driver can switch on/off his availability

5. A rider can book a cab

6. Fetch history of all rides taken by a rider.

7. End the Trip

Expectation from this round

1. Demonstrable code is first expectation.

2. Code should be extensible.

3. Clean professional level code.

4. Functional Completeness including good modelling.

Only thing is that I have to write the code on the google doc itself and I wrote a clean code and explained him whole functionality very well.

You can just try to solve these questions by yourself now. I will be uploading the solution to this question in the next blog.

3. Third round of interview: Cultural Round

This round is basically taken by the director of the particular team. He asked me about my projects and the role in which I was working in my last company. I explained about projects very well and he asked me a couple of questions regarding my projects as follows.

Behavioral Questions

1. How do you come to the final approach to the problem?
2. What are the blockers, that have you faced while doing this project?
3. What is the release process in your company?
4. What is the most challenging project that you have done, and how do you face that challenge?

…………..some more behavioral questions about projects and leadership skills.

Technical Questions :

1. Can you explain the Java memory model?
2. What is the volatile keyword in java?
3. What do you about serialization?
4. Are you aware of NoSql (MongoDB)?
5. What is a factory design pattern?
6. What are the thread pools and the difference b/w the fixed thread pool and cached thread pool?

I have answered almost all questions politely and got a call from HR the next day that I have cleared all rounds.

Reading does not stop here, feel free to check the uber interview experience here.

Uber interview experience SDE2

Thanks you reading this blog . Hope you would have a better idea of zeta interview process and the questions asked.