Zalando Backend Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I applied on the website, and after two weeks, I got a 20-minute HR call. The person interviewing me wasn't super friendly, and it was a pretty standard interview. They asked about my background and why I wanted to work there. Two weeks later, I got an automated email saying the job was filled. I emailed the recruiter, but got no reply back and was basically ghosted.

I had an initial interview with Zalando's internal recruiter and then 2 more interviews for the role. Overall I am extremely disappointed with the experience. During the interview with the recruiter they offered to schedule another appointment to help prepare and understand the hiring process better, after sharing my availability for this meeting I got ghosted, when I followed up I simply got a generic reply and to let them know if I had any questions. The second interview was a technical interview that consisted on a discussion on my overall experience and an algorithms question that I would put on easy/medium-easy. This was a very satisfying interview with a great professional, sadly the rest of the experience puts a bitter note to this. The final interview I was invited to was a hiring manager interview. The questions for this interview would be what you expect to find after googling "top 10 HR tech interview questions". They barely left 5 min for questions of the schedule time and cut it abruptly after that, clearly no interest in the interviewee asking questions. Initially they informed me that the process is expected to last 20 days, between the 1st and 2nd interview at least half of that time went by.

The interview process had 4 stages, starting with a recruiter screening. Then there was a technical challenge on Codility. After that, a technical discussion with the Engineering lead. The final stage had 3 parts: a technical discussion about technologies in the job description, a system design interview, and a live coding session. The whole process was clear from the start and my experience was positive, with detailed feedback at the end. The Codility challenge questions were easy to medium difficulty, and the system design question in the final stage was straightforward.