Interview experience
Swiggy interview experiences covering Online Assessment, Technical Round 1, Technical Round 2, HR. Round-wise notes, common questions, and what candidates report clears each stage.
Swiggy Interview Questions and Answers (2026)
Swiggy is India's leading on-demand food delivery and hyperlocal services platform, founded in 2014. It is known for technology-driven logistics and large-scale food delivery operations across 500 or more Indian cities. Swiggy recruits engineers for backend systems, mobile apps, and real-time logistics platforms.
Explore: Interview experience · HR interview questions · Overview · Placement papers · Preparation guide
Overview
Swiggy’s loop is a fairly standard 4-stage product-company process, but its second technical round is distinctly domain-flavoured - candidates reason about order assignment and ETA systems rather than generic system design.
HR interview questions
Swiggy HR interview questions with sample answer frameworks - motivation, relocation, STAR stories, and culture-fit prompts.
Swiggy interview process at a glance
| Round | Duration | What they test |
|---|---|---|
| Online Assessment | 90 min | 2-3 coding problems |
| Technical Round 1 | 45-60 min | DSA + project discussion |
| Technical Round 2 | 45-60 min | System design (orders / logistics) |
| HR | 20-30 min | Behavioural + culture fit |
Swiggy online assessment: quick answers
These answers are compiled from public candidate reports and prep guides, not from an official Swiggy notice, and drives differ. The instruction screen of your own test is the final word.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| How many questions and how long? | Usually 3 DSA problems in 75-90 minutes, often 1 easy, 1 medium and 1 hard, or 2 medium and 1 hard. One 2021 campus test added a medium SQL question to the 3 coding problems in 90 minutes. |
| Does it have negative marking? | No public report mentions any. It is a coding test scored on test cases passed. |
| Is there a sectional cutoff? | Not reported. When a SQL question is included it is scored with the coding problems, not as a separate gate. |
| How much is the cutoff? | Not published; shortlists are relative to the batch. Eligibility varies by campus: one 2021 campus report mentions a 7.0 CGPA cutoff, and other student reports cite 6.5+ or 65% with no active backlogs. |
| Which platform is it on? | HackerRank, in almost every report. Some later live rounds are run by a third-party interviewer platform. |
| Which languages are allowed? | Reports conflict. A 2026 SDE-1 referral candidate says only Java and Golang were enabled; older campus reports describe the usual HackerRank list including C++ and Python. |
| What topics come up? | Medium greedy, DP and graph problems, row-with-most-1s and zero-sum triplet style array questions, and interval or delivery-slot variants. |
Swiggy interview questions by role
These topics come from LeetCode Discuss, GfG and Code360 interview experiences and from analyst guides that quote AmbitionBox reviews. They show the level and style, not a fixed list.
| Role | Reported questions and topics |
|---|---|
| SDE intern | HackerRank OA with medium greedy and DP questions (graphs for some candidates), then DSA interviews on similar topics and your projects. |
| SDE-1 | 3-problem OA; a one-hour DSA and fundamentals round (a bit-manipulation problem, a Merge Intervals variant, then about 25 minutes of Java questions in a 2026 report); an LLD round to assign drivers to orders; a hiring-manager round on your projects and stack choices such as why MongoDB. |
| SDE-2 | Medium-hard OA (rotated-array binary search, stacks, DP), machine coding or LLD such as a Splitwise-style app (one round ran 2.5 hours), and combined LLD plus HLD on coupons, carts or order assignment. |
| Business / data analyst | A HackerRank SQL test (one report: 8 questions of mixed difficulty) on joins over restaurant-order data, then cases such as diagnosing a 5% drop in orders, estimating order volume or helping a restaurant that gets no orders, and what you would improve in the Swiggy app and how you would measure it. |
Asked across every role: why Swiggy, a project you can defend line by line, and a time you fixed something under pressure.
Online Assessment
A timed 90–120 minute coding test (HackerRank, HackerEarth, or equivalent) with 2–3 DSA problems; some drives add SQL. SDE-2 candidate reports describe medium–hard emphasis (binary search on rotated arrays, stacks, DP). Clean, fully passing solutions score better than partially clever but incomplete ones - shortlist decisions often arrive within a week.
Common questions
- Top-K frequent elements - typically expects a heap or bucket-sort approach
- Shortest path in a grid - typically expects BFS
- Merge overlapping delivery slots / intervals - typically expects an interval-merge approach
- Search in rotated sorted array - binary search variant (common in SDE-2 OAs)
- Subarray / greedy variants tied to delivery timing (candidate-reported)
Technical Round 1
A 45-60 minute round mixing 1-2 DSA problems with a detailed walkthrough of your resume project - stack choices, your hardest bug, and what you’d rebuild differently. Some drives fold in a light domain question here too.
Common questions
- Solve a DSA problem live, then discuss complexity and edge cases explicitly
- Walk through your project’s architecture and your specific contribution
- What was the hardest bug you debugged, and how did you find it?
- Explain order assignment or ETA at a conceptual level - inputs, outputs, what breaks at scale
Technical Round 2
A system-design round grounded in Swiggy’s own domain rather than generic distributed-systems trivia - order assignment, ETA reliability, menu search, coupon redemption, and inventory are recurring themes. SDE-2 loops may combine LLD + HLD + API + DB schema in one 60–75 minute session; some use a BarRaiser or third-party platform for consistency.
Common questions
- How would you design an order-assignment system matching delivery partners to orders?
- How would you keep delivery ETAs reliable during a demand surge, like a rainy evening or a big cricket match?
- Design a menu-search feature - data model, APIs, and failure modes
- Design Swiggy’s coupon system - apply, eligible, redeem, invalidate; idempotent redemption under concurrency
- Multi-restaurant cart - split into domain orders, parentOrderId / sibling orders, race handling
- What would you monitor to catch this system breaking in production?
Full round-by-round narratives are on the Swiggy interview experience page.
HR / managerial round
A closing 20-30 minute conversation on motivation, comfort with ambiguity, and logistics like on-call or weekend availability.
Common questions
- Tell me about yourself and why Swiggy?
- How do you approach working with unclear or changing requirements?
- Tell me about a time you worked across teams (ops, delivery partners, restaurant partners) to fix a customer-facing problem
- Are you comfortable with on-call or weekend rotations?
Sample answer frameworks for each of these are on the Swiggy HR interview questions page.
Swiggy SDE-1 vs SDE-2 interview loop
The SDE-1 loop, which most freshers and campus hires see, is mostly DSA: a 3-problem coding OA, one or two DSA and fundamentals interviews, and a hiring-manager or HR round. Recent SDE-1 reports also include one LLD round with a small coding task, such as assigning delivery partners to orders.
The SDE-2 loop keeps the OA but leans on design: machine coding or LLD (Splitwise-style apps, coupon systems, multi-restaurant carts) and an HLD round on Swiggy’s own logistics problems. This page covers both, but if you are a fresher, focus on the OA, DSA and the single LLD round; the coupon and cart design material above is mainly SDE-2.
Common technical interview questions and answers
Q: Find the k most frequent elements in an array.
Build a frequency map in one pass in O(n), then either keep a min-heap of size k, popping when it grows past k, for O(n log k) time, or use bucket sort with n plus one buckets indexed by frequency and walk down from the highest bucket for O(n) time. Space is O(n) for the map either way. Say which you would pick and why: heap when k is small relative to n, bucket sort when k approaches n. Ask about tie-breaking before you code, because the statement rarely defines it.
Q: Find the shortest path from a start cell to a target cell in a grid with obstacles.
Because every move costs the same, plain BFS gives the shortest path - Dijkstra is unnecessary overhead here. Push the start into a queue with distance zero, mark it visited, and expand the four neighbours, skipping obstacles and out-of-bounds cells, marking each visited at enqueue time rather than dequeue time to avoid duplicates. The first time you dequeue the target, its distance is optimal. Time and space are both O(rows times columns). If some cells cost more to cross, switch to Dijkstra with a priority queue, or 0-1 BFS with a deque when the only two costs are zero and one.
Q: Merge a list of overlapping delivery time slots.
Sort the slots by start time, then sweep once holding a current slot: if the next slot starts at or before the current end, extend the current end to the maximum of the two ends, otherwise emit the current slot and start a new one. That is O(n log n) dominated by the sort, with O(n) output. Decide up front whether a slot ending at 6:00 and one starting at 6:00 count as overlapping, since both answers are defensible and the interviewer wants the assumption stated. For a streaming variant where slots arrive continuously, keep them in a balanced interval tree instead of re-sorting.
Q: Write a SQL query for the top three restaurants by order count in the last seven days.
SELECT r.id, r.name, COUNT(*) AS orders FROM orders o JOIN restaurants r ON r.id = o.restaurant_id WHERE o.created_at is at or after CURRENT_DATE minus 7 days AND o.status = ‘DELIVERED’ GROUP BY r.id, r.name ORDER BY orders DESC LIMIT 3. Two details matter: filter on order status in the WHERE clause so cancelled orders do not inflate counts, and include every non-aggregated selected column in the GROUP BY. If you need the top three per city rather than overall, wrap it in a window function using ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY city ORDER BY orders DESC) and filter to rank at most three, because LIMIT cannot express per-group top-N.
Q: How would you design an order-assignment system that matches delivery partners to orders?
Maintain a geospatial index of available partners - a hexagonal grid such as H3, or a geohash prefix - updated from location pings every few seconds, so finding candidates near a restaurant is a cell lookup rather than a scan. Score each candidate on distance to pickup, current batch load, direction of travel, and historical acceptance rate, then assign in small batches rather than greedily one order at a time, because batching lets you solve a bipartite matching that reduces total delivery time. Assignment must be atomic - a compare-and-swap on the partner’s state prevents double-assigning one rider to two orders. Handle rejection and timeout by re-queueing the order with a widening search radius, and cap retries so an unassignable order escalates to ops instead of looping forever.
Q: How do you keep delivery ETAs reliable during a demand surge?
Split the ETA into components you can measure separately: partner-to-restaurant travel, restaurant food-preparation time, and restaurant-to-customer travel. Surges break the model mainly through preparation time and partner availability, not road speed, so feed live signals - current queue depth at that restaurant, supply-to-demand ratio in the cell, and rain or event flags - into the model as features rather than relying on a static historical average. Predict a distribution and quote a conservative percentile such as p80 instead of the mean, because a late order costs far more in trust than an early one. Recompute the ETA continuously during the trip and monitor the error distribution per city per hour, since a model that is fine on average can be badly wrong in one cell.
Q: What is the difference between an abstract class and an interface, and when do you use each?
An abstract class can hold state, constructors, and concrete method implementations, and a class can extend only one of them; an interface declares a contract, holds no instance state, and a class can implement many. Use an abstract class when several subclasses genuinely share implementation and identity - a base Payment holding an amount and a shared audit-logging method - and an interface when unrelated classes need to be interchangeable at a call site, such as Serializable or Comparable. Modern Java allows default methods on interfaces, which narrows the gap but still forbids instance fields. The practical guideline is that interfaces express capability while abstract classes express a shared partial implementation.
Q: What would you monitor to catch this system breaking in production?
Track the business funnel first, because it fails visibly before infrastructure does: orders placed, orders assigned within N seconds, assignment rejection rate, and unassigned-order backlog per city. Add latency percentiles rather than averages - p50, p95, and p99 on the assignment API - since an average hides the tail that customers actually feel. Instrument the dependency layer with error rate, saturation, and cache hit ratio, and alert on symptoms such as rising unassigned backlog rather than on causes such as CPU, so a novel failure still pages someone. Every alert needs a defined owner and a runbook, otherwise the dashboard becomes noise that nobody trusts during an incident.
Q: Design a notification system (SMS, email, in-app) with history and scheduling.
Model Notification, Template, Channel adapters, and User preferences. Ingest events via a queue; a dispatcher worker picks channel strategy per user, writes an immutable history row, and hands off to SMS/email/push providers. Scheduling uses a delayed queue or cron scanner with idempotent job ids. Discuss retry, DLQ, rate limits per channel, and how to extend new channels without changing core dispatch logic (strategy pattern).
Q: Find the single element that appears once in a sorted array where every other element appears twice.
Binary search on index parity: if the unique element is at index mid, the pattern of pairs before mid breaks - compare nums[mid] with nums[mid-1] and nums[mid+1] to decide which half still holds the anomaly. O(log n) time, O(1) space. Swiggy SDE-2 reports cite this advanced binary-search pattern alongside rotated-array search.
Q: Design coupon apply and redeem with concurrency safety.
Store offers with usage limits and per-user caps. apply validates eligibility read-only; redeem runs in a transaction with row-level lock or compare-and-swap on remaining budget, writing a redemption id for idempotency. Emit events to Kafka for analytics. Handle partial failures with compensating invalidate calls; cache eligible coupons with short TTL but never trust cache for final redeem authority.
Frequently asked questions about Swiggy interviews
Does the Swiggy online assessment have negative marking?
No public report mentions negative marking. The Swiggy OA is a HackerRank coding test, usually 3 DSA problems (sometimes plus one SQL question) in 75-90 minutes, scored on test cases passed.
Which languages are allowed in the Swiggy online assessment?
Reports conflict. A 2026 SDE-1 referral candidate says only Java and Golang were enabled, while older campus reports describe the usual HackerRank language list including C++ and Python. Check the language dropdown before you start, and be ready to code in Java if C++ is missing.
What is the Swiggy interview process for freshers?
Usually 4 stages over 2-4 weeks (from student reports): 1. Online Coding Assessment (90-120 min): 2-3 DSA problems on a HackerRank-style platform. 2. Technical Interviews (2 rounds, 45-60 min each): the first mixes DSA with a project discussion, the second is system design centered on Swiggy’s logistics domain (order assignment, ETA). 3. HR / managerial round (20-30 min): behavioural fit and offer discussion. Total duration: 2-4 weeks.
What questions are asked in Swiggy interviews?
Swiggy interviews commonly cover DSA (Top-K frequent elements, shortest path in a grid via BFS, interval-merge problems), core CS fundamentals (OOPs, SQL), a detailed project discussion, and domain-flavoured system design around order assignment, ETA prediction, and menu search. Behavioural rounds check ownership, teamwork, and comfort with on-call/weekend rotations.
How many rounds are there in the Swiggy interview?
Swiggy typically runs 4 stages: Online Assessment (90 min), Technical Round 1 (45-60 min, DSA + project), Technical Round 2 (45-60 min, system design), and HR (20-30 min). Some drives merge HR with the managerial round or skip a stage - check that cycle’s placement email.
What is Swiggy’s system design round about?
Swiggy’s second technical round leans into its logistics domain rather than generic system design: candidates are asked to reason about order assignment (matching delivery partners to orders), ETA calculation, or menu search - explaining bottlenecks, failure modes, and simple APIs in plain language rather than reciting buzzwords like ‘microservices’ without substance.
How should I prepare for Swiggy interviews?
Practise timed DSA under time pressure (Swiggy’s screening round rewards clean, passing solutions over partial cleverness), revise OOPs and SQL since they open a lot of Swiggy panels, prepare one crisp project narrative covering your hardest bug, and read up on how food-delivery order assignment and ETA systems work at a conceptual level. Use STAR for behavioural answers.
What Swiggy interviewers score
Food-marketplace engineering loops typically run OA → DSA → design/managerial → HR. Interviewers score:
- Medium DSA completed under time.
- Marketplace design sense - assignment, ETAs, catalog, surge-like load - explained simply.
- Ops empathy and ownership - peak-hour stories, Bengaluru/hub logistics, measurable Results.
Soft fail modes: confusing delivery-partner constraints with pure CRUD apps, or Easy-only prep for a product OA.
Does Swiggy ask machine coding for freshers?
SDE-1 loops are often DSA-heavy after the OA, while many SDE-2 processes add machine coding or LLD (order assignment, notifications, catalog). Even for fresher invites, prepare one timed OOP build you can extend - driver-order assignment and notification systems appear often in public reports.
How to prepare for Swiggy 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 Swiggy?” on the HR page.
Who usually fits and who struggles
Good fit: You enjoy medium-hard LeetCode-style problems, can talk about order state machines and delivery assignment without jargon soup, and have STAR stories for customer focus. Comfort with Bengaluru relocation helps.
Harder path: You only practiced aptitude MCQs; you skip LLD because “freshers don’t get design”; you cannot explain your project. OA clear rates are often cited around ~10-15% - guessing through edges fails quietly.
A practical Swiggy prep plan
Use this as a default four-week loop before a Swiggy drive. Adjust to your invite timeline.
- Week 1: Oa pattern first: sit one untimed paper, then redo it under the real clock. Open the Swiggy 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 Swiggy 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 Swiggy 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 Swiggy?” 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 Swiggy often cite ₹16-22 LPA for SDE-1 freshers. 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 Swiggy interview experience page. For OA papers and coding drills, use Swiggy on placementpapers.app. OA quick answers and role-wise questions draw on LeetCode Discuss, GfG and Code360 Swiggy SDE and intern interview experiences (2021-2026) and Interview Query’s Swiggy business analyst guide, which quotes AmbitionBox reviews.
Also prepare for
Guides often searched alongside this page: Zomato interview questions · Uber interview questions · Blinkit interview questions · Amazon interview questions · Flipkart interview questions · Ola interview questions.