Referral-only application; Round 1 covered Redis, Kafka, SQL, and an LLD Snake game problem

Zomato Interview Experience | November 2025 | SDE-2

Application Mode: Referral
(They only accept applications via employee referrals.)

Round 1

Redis
Why is Redis extremely fast?
How does Redis handle large scale despite being single-threaded?

Kafka
How can consumer throughput be increased?
What happens when consumption lags behind production?

SQL
Given: Order state transitions with timestamps
States: Created -> Confirmed -> Reached Merchant -> Reached Customer -> Delivered
Questions:
Write a query to fetch all order IDs with their latest state in the last 1 hour
Exclude orders that are already delivered
How would this query behave at scale?
What indexes would you add?

Low-Level Design - Snake and Food Game
Design snake movement logic
Ensure movement happens in O(1)
Handle food consumption and snake growth
Explain data structure choices & trade-offs
Write pseudocode

Result: Rejected