Interview experience
Dunzo interview experiences covering Online Assessment, Technical Round 1, Technical Round 2, HR. Round-wise notes, common questions, and what candidates report clears each stage.
Dunzo Interview Questions and Answers (2026)
Dunzo was a Bengaluru-based hyperlocal delivery startup, founded in 2014, that offered quick commerce and courier services across Indian cities. Backed at various points by Google and Reliance, its hiring activity has been uncertain following restructuring, so candidates should verify current openings.
HQ: Bengaluru, India
Website: dunzo.com ↗
Explore: Interview experience · HR interview questions · Overview · Placement papers · Preparation guide
Overview
Dunzo’s hiring loop is archived here for historical reference only - the company shut down in January 2025. While it operated, the fresher SDE process typically ran an Online Assessment, technical rounds (DSA and logistics-flavoured system design), then managerial and HR stages.
HR interview questions
Dunzo HR interview questions with sample answer frameworks - motivation, relocation, STAR stories, and culture-fit prompts.
Dunzo interview process at a glance (historical)
| Round | Duration | What they test |
|---|---|---|
| Online Assessment | 90 min | 2-3 coding problems (often medium–hard; graphs, DP, optimization) |
| Technical Round 1 | 45-65 min | Live coding on Meet - DSA, explain OA solutions |
| Technical Round 2 | 45-65 min | More DSA or system design scoped to logistics |
| Managerial / cultural fit | 30-45 min | Resume + project code walkthrough, why Dunzo, learning habits |
| HR | 20-30 min | Behavioural + culture fit; offer terms for lateral hires |
Eligibility (from campus reports): roughly 7.0+ CGPA / 70% throughout for fresher drives; exact cutoffs varied by college tier. Timeline: often 3–4 weeks end to end when hiring was active - OA clearance in days, then back-to-back technicals, same-day select mails reported on some intern loops (GFG Dunzo intern 2023).
Dunzo online assessment: quick answers (historical)
Dunzo shut down in January 2025, so none of this is a live process. These answers are compiled from public candidate reports from when Dunzo was hiring, and are kept for reference and for practising similar quick-commerce tests.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Is Dunzo hiring in 2026? | No. The app and website went offline in January 2025 (Business Today, 15 January 2025), Reliance valued its stake at nil in its FY25 annual report, and no revival or hiring has been announced as of 2026. |
| How many questions and how long was the test? | 90 minutes with 2-3 problems. A 2023 on-campus SDE intern test had one DSA problem and one API-based problem, both medium-hard. A GfG Software Engineer 2 report describes 3 problems in 100 minutes, one of them fetching and sorting paginated data from a public API. |
| Did it have negative marking? | No public report mentions any. It was a coding test scored on test cases, with no MCQ section described. |
| Was there a sectional cutoff? | Not reported. With 2-3 coding problems there were no separate sections. |
| How much was the cutoff? | Not published; shortlists were relative to the batch and tight. In the 2023 intern drive, 13 students cleared the test, 3 cleared the first interview and 2 reached the final round. Campus eligibility was roughly 7.0+ CGPA or 70%. |
| Which platform was it on? | Not published. None of the GfG Dunzo reports (2023 intern, another campus intern report, Software Engineer 2) names the platform. |
| What topics came up? | Counting substrings that contain all vowels, a modified knapsack and a matrix problem (scored out of 200 in one intern report), maximum sum of M non-overlapping subarrays of size K, rebuilding a matrix from its prefix sums, route optimisation with time windows and Stone Game-style DP. |
Dunzo interview questions by role (historical)
These topics come from a GfG interview experience and other candidate reports from when Dunzo was hiring. They show the level and style, not a fixed list.
| Role | Reported questions and topics |
|---|---|
| SDE intern (campus, 2023) | Tech 1 (60-65 minutes on Google Meet): Stone Game V (game theory plus DP) and a Russian Doll Envelopes style LIS variant with binary search. Tech 2: Longest Valid Parentheses optimised to O(n), and first missing positive in O(n) time and constant space. |
| SDE intern (campus, another GfG report) | Lexicographically smallest subsequence of length k in O(n) with a stack; minimum cell changes in an arrow grid to reach the bottom-right; counting nodes in a complete binary tree in O(log² n); sum of subarray minimums and maximums; largest rectangle of 1s in a binary matrix. |
| SDE-1 (fresher) | 90-minute OA, then DSA rounds where you explain your OA solutions, and a logistics design round: real-time delivery tracking, route optimisation for several partners, batching orders onto one rider. |
| Cultural fit (all roles) | With a senior manager for 30-35 minutes: why IT, your project tech stack, a screen-shared walk through your project code, favourite subjects, why Dunzo, how you learn a new stack and which data structures you are studying now. |
Asked across every role: a live walk through your own project code, which candidates said mattered as much as the DSA.
Online Assessment (historical)
Ninety minutes, typically two to three problems on HackerRank or an in-house platform. Reported shapes include route optimization with time windows, maximum deliveries in a window, Stone Game–style DP, longest valid parentheses, and first missing positive integer - not pure implementation trivia. Partial scoring and explaining approach mattered: intern write-ups note interviewers saying a clear approach could still pass even if code was incomplete.
Technical Round 1 (historical)
Screen-shared live coding. Expect two medium problems plus “walk me through your OA solution.” Interviewers probed time/space complexity, edge cases, and whether you could optimize after a working brute force (for example parentheses from O(n²) to O(n)). Project discussion was lighter here than in managerial rounds.
Technical Round 2 (historical)
Either a second DSA-heavy session or system design - “design real-time delivery tracking,” “optimize routes for multiple partners,” or “batch orders onto one rider.” Scoping beats buzzwords: data model for orders, location ingest, ETA recompute, and failure modes (partner offline, duplicate place-order).
Managerial / HR (historical)
Senior managers ran cultural fitment: why IT, favourite academic subjects, proud project, live code walkthrough, how you learn new stacks, and why Dunzo over Flipkart or Swiggy. HR closed with relocation, notice period, and career goals. See the HR interview questions page for STAR frameworks.
Common HR questions historically asked at Dunzo
- Tell me about yourself?
- Why Dunzo?
- How would you handle a customer escalation when a delivery partner is stuck and an order is running late?
- Tell me about a time you solved a problem quickly with limited resources or under a tight deadline?
These are kept for historical reference only - Dunzo is not conducting interviews. For live HR-question prep in the same domain, see Blinkit’s HR interview questions or Swiggy’s HR interview questions.
Dunzo vs Blinkit and Swiggy Instamart: where to prepare now
Dunzo is closed, so this page is an archive. The interview themes - logistics DSA, delivery tracking, rider batching, dark-store inventory - carry straight over to the quick-commerce companies that are still hiring.
Blinkit runs a 90-minute HackerRank OA (sometimes with core-CS MCQs) and design rounds on dark stores and 10-minute delivery. Swiggy, which runs Instamart, uses a 3-problem coding OA and design rounds on order assignment and ETAs. If you came here to prepare for a quick-commerce interview, use those pages for the current process and use the Dunzo questions on this page as extra practice.
Common technical interview questions and answers
Q: How would you find the shortest route between two points on a city road network?
The standard answer is Dijkstra’s algorithm on a weighted graph whose nodes are intersections and whose edge weights are travel time rather than raw distance, so traffic can be modelled. With a binary heap it runs in O((V + E) log V), and it is correct as long as no edge weight is negative, which holds for travel times. For city-scale graphs, A* with a straight-line-distance heuristic explores far fewer nodes while remaining optimal, because that heuristic never overestimates true travel time; bidirectional search from both origin and destination roughly halves the explored area again. Dunzo’s online assessment historically leaned on route-flavoured graph problems like this - kept here as archive, since the company shut down in January 2025.
Q: How would you batch several delivery orders onto one rider?
Batching is a vehicle-routing problem, which is NP-hard, so production systems use heuristics rather than exact solutions. A practical approach is to cluster nearby pickups and drop-offs geographically, order the stops within a batch using a nearest-neighbour or cheapest-insertion heuristic, then improve the sequence with 2-opt local search. Every candidate batch is scored against the promised delivery window: the batch is rejected if adding a stop pushes any order past its SLA, and a pickup must always precede its own drop-off. Real systems also cap batch size and re-evaluate as new orders arrive rather than solving once. Archive reference only.
Q: How would you find the nearest available delivery partners to a pickup point?
Scanning every partner’s latitude and longitude is O(n) per lookup and does not scale, so use a spatial index. Geohash encodes a location as a short string where a shared prefix means geographic proximity, so you can fetch candidates with a prefix query in a key-value store, then also check the eight neighbouring cells so you do not miss a partner just across a cell boundary. Uber’s H3 hexagonal grid solves the same problem with uniform neighbour distances, and a quadtree adapts cell size to partner density. Redis geospatial commands such as GEOADD and GEOSEARCH give this out of the box, backed by a sorted set of geohash scores. Filter the candidate set by availability and current load, then rank by estimated travel time.
Q: How would you design real-time order tracking for the customer app?
The rider app emits a location ping every few seconds over a persistent connection, written to a low-latency store such as Redis keyed by order id rather than to the primary database, since the value is overwritten constantly and stale pings have little value. Customers receive updates over a WebSocket where a live connection is worth the cost, with short polling as a cheaper fallback on poor networks. Location history worth keeping for audit or ETA modelling goes to a queue and then a time-series or object store asynchronously. ETA is recomputed on the server from the current position and remaining route rather than on the client, so every surface agrees. Historical reference - Dunzo no longer operates.
Q: Why does an order service need an idempotency key, and how does the order state machine work?
Mobile clients on flaky networks retry requests, so the same place-order call can arrive twice. An idempotency key is a client-generated unique id stored with the order; the server checks it before creating anything and returns the original result on a repeat, so a retry never creates a duplicate order or a duplicate payment capture. The order itself is best modelled as an explicit state machine - created, accepted, picked up, in transit, delivered, cancelled - where only legal transitions are permitted and each transition is written in a transaction alongside its side effect. That makes an illegal jump, such as delivered back to accepted, impossible, and makes crash recovery a matter of resuming from the last persisted state.
Q: How do you rate limit an API, and which algorithm would you pick during a demand surge?
The token bucket algorithm is the usual choice: tokens refill at a fixed rate up to a bucket capacity, each request consumes one, and a request arriving with no token is rejected with HTTP 429. It allows short bursts up to the bucket size while capping the sustained rate, which suits real user traffic better than a fixed window - a fixed window lets roughly double the limit through at a window boundary. Sliding window log is more accurate but stores a timestamp per request, so sliding window counter is the common compromise. In a distributed setup the counters live in Redis with atomic increments so every API instance shares one limit, and limits are usually keyed per user or per API key rather than per IP.
Q: What is the difference between first-mile, middle-mile, and last-mile delivery?
First-mile moves goods from a seller or dark store into the network (pickup, sortation). Middle-mile runs between hubs or cities - fewer stops, larger vehicles. Last-mile is the final leg to the customer and is what Dunzo’s consumer app optimized: partner assignment, batching, and SLA windows. Interview panels used this vocabulary to see whether you understand where routing algorithms apply (last-mile graphs) versus where inventory and warehouse systems dominate (first/middle). Archive only - Dunzo shut down in January 2025.
Q: How would you find the first missing positive integer in an unsorted array in O(n) time?
Treat the array as a hash table keyed by index: for each value v in 1…n, swap v toward index v−1 so value i ideally sits at index i−1. Scan once; the first index where nums[i] ≠ i+1 gives the answer. This appeared in reported Dunzo OA and second-round lists (GeeksforGeeks intern 2023). Requires O(1) extra space if you swap in place. Historical reference.
Q: How would you design a flash-sale or high-concurrency checkout for limited inventory?
Separate read and write paths: cache product pages, but place orders through a queue or single-writer partition per SKU so inventory decrements are atomic - optimistic locking with version columns or a Redis DECR with a floor at zero. Payment capture should happen after inventory reservation with idempotency keys so retries do not double-charge. Reported experienced-hire Dunzo design rounds used similar concurrency prompts. Archive reference.
Q: Explain longest valid parentheses in O(n) time.
Single left-to-right scan with a stack of indices (or two counters for open/close). Push index on ‘(’; on ‘)’, pop and compute length from the new top or zero baseline. Alternatively track running open/close counts and reset when invalid. Dunzo’s intern loop asked for optimization from quadratic to linear. Historical only.
Q: What KPIs would you track for a delivery operations team?
Candidate-reported operations questions include on-time delivery rate, average delivery time, partner utilization, cost per order, cancellation and return rates, and SLA breach counts by zone. Engineering answers tie KPIs to metrics you would instrument - queue depth, assignment latency, ETA error distribution. Useful for HR/ops tracks; Dunzo no longer hires.
Frequently asked questions about Dunzo
Did the Dunzo online assessment have negative marking?
No public report mentions negative marking. When Dunzo was hiring, its online assessment was a 90-minute coding test - 2 to 3 problems, scored on test cases - with no MCQ section described in candidate reports. Dunzo shut down in January 2025, so there is no current test.
What was asked in the Dunzo online assessment?
Medium-hard coding problems. A 2023 on-campus SDE intern test had one DSA problem and one API-based problem in 90 minutes, with 13 students clearing it; other reports list route optimisation with time windows, Stone Game-style DP, longest valid parentheses and first missing positive.
Is Dunzo still hiring? Is Dunzo shut down?
No - Dunzo has shut down. The app and website went offline in mid-January 2025 after cofounder and CEO Kabeer Biswas left to join Flipkart’s quick-commerce business, Minutes, following 12-18 months of operating at a bare minimum. Reliance Retail, which led a funding round in January 2022 with about $200 million and held roughly 26%, wrote the investment off: Reliance Industries’ FY25 annual report valued the stake (pegged at ₹1,645 crore in FY24) at nil. In 2025 the company faced creditor insolvency pleas at NCLT Bengaluru, one of which was dismissed in May 2025, and no revival has been announced as of 2026, so there is no current Dunzo hiring process to prepare for.
What was the Dunzo interview process like when it was operating?
Usually 4-5 stages. Historically, Dunzo’s fresher SDE process ran: an Online Assessment (90 min, 2-3 coding problems, often route-optimization/logistics-flavoured), one or two Technical Interviews (DSA plus a system-design round scoped to delivery/logistics - real-time tracking, route optimization), a Managerial round, and an HR round. This is kept here as a historical/archival reference, not as live prep material, since the company no longer operates.
Why did Dunzo fail?
Dunzo pivoted into quick commerce in 2021 and ended up competing against much better-capitalised rivals - Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart - who could sustain far greater dark-store density. Dunzo was unable to raise the funding needed to keep pace, accumulated unpaid vendor and employee obligations, and lost three of its four cofounders before shutting down entirely in January 2025.
Should I still apply to or prepare for Dunzo?
No - Dunzo is not accepting applications or conducting interviews, since the company has shut down. If you’re preparing for quick-commerce/hyperlocal-delivery interviews generally, the still-operating players in that space (Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart) are the more useful targets - see the Blinkit and Swiggy pages on this site for current, live interview processes with the same domain flavour (routing, inventory sync, delivery SLAs).
What interviewers score (historical loop)
| Stage | Strong signal | Weak signal |
|---|---|---|
| OA | Logistics-flavoured DSA with clear approach even if code is incomplete | Jumping to code with wrong constraints |
| Tech DSA | Graphs/heaps/time windows explained with complexity | Memorised LeetCode without mapping to delivery |
| Design | Real-time tracking + routing trade-offs | “Uber clone” with six microservices and no ETA model |
| Cultural / HR | Why hyperlocal + learning-stack STAR | Generic startup praise; blank on project code walkthrough |
Dunzo is not hiring after the 2025 shutdown. Use this scoring map as practice for Blinkit, Zepto, or Swiggy Instamart loops with the same logistics flavour.
Red flags (and why this page still exists)
- Preparing as if Dunzo still runs campus drives
- Ignoring that OA/design themes transfer to live quick-commerce companies
- Badmouthing the shutdown story instead of extracting engineering lessons
- Skipping cultural-fit prep (project walkthrough + why this domain)
How to prepare for Dunzo interviews
- Loop map: Online Assessment; Technical Round 1; Technical Round 2; HR. Confirm timings from the drive mail.
- Technical depth: Drill the Q&A section until answers are spoken, not read. Know every resume project cold.
- Experiences: Study round-wise notes on the interview experience page - real prompts beat generic lists.
- HR: Three STAR stories + a specific “Why Dunzo?” on the HR page.
Looking for quick-commerce interview prep that’s still current?
Blinkit interview questions
Blinkit is actively hiring - same quick-commerce/hyperlocal domain as Dunzo, with a live, current interview process.
Swiggy interview questions
Swiggy (including Instamart) is actively hiring for logistics and delivery-tech roles.
A practical Dunzo prep plan
Use this as a default four-week loop before a Dunzo drive. Adjust to your invite timeline.
- Week 1: Oa pattern first: sit one untimed paper, then redo it under the real clock. Open the Dunzo previous-year sets on this site and mark which sections ate your time. Write the timing on a sticky note. That number is more useful than a 200-problem LeetCode streak you never timed.
- Week 2: Most Dunzo drives fail people on the first timed paper or OA. Do three timed sits this week. After each one, log every miss in a two-column note: topic and why (slow, wrong formula, bad edge case, panic). The next sit should only add problems from that log.
- Week 3: Technical interviews at Dunzo usually want a clean project story, one or two CS fundamentals, and (if the process has it) a behavioral or values round. Write STAR stories on paper, not in your head. Practise “Why Dunzo?” with one concrete product, lab, or business line - not a slogan.
- Week 4: Star stories + one project walkthrough recorded on your phone. If you still have energy, redo only the questions you failed in week 2.
10-day crash version: Days 1-4 timed DSA, days 5-7 resume projects + CS fundamentals, days 8-9 mock interviews out loud, day 10 HR STAR stories on the HR page.
Compensation notes
Candidate-reported fresher/early-career packages for Dunzo often cite ₹12-18 LPA SWE · Use papers for: Swiggy / Blinkit / Zepto style DSA +. Treat forum numbers as ranges, not guarantees - confirm the written offer letter for your team and location.
Sources
Interview process details and sample questions on this site are editorially organized from public candidate reports and hiring write-ups, with round structure, prep notes, and company-specific framing added by our team. For round-by-round stories, see the Dunzo interview experience page. For OA papers and coding drills, use Dunzo on placementpapers.app. The historical OA quick answers and role-wise questions draw on GfG’s Dunzo interview experiences (SDE intern on-campus 2023, a second SDE intern on-campus report and Software Engineer 2), and the shutdown facts on Business Today’s 15 January 2025 report, Inc42’s 8 August 2025 report on Reliance’s FY25 write-off, and Storyboard18’s 28 May 2025 report on the NCLT dismissing one insolvency plea.