I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Zalando (Stockholm, Stockholm) in May 2024
Interview
I interviewed for a backend senior software engineer role at Zalando, it started with a 30 minute intro call with a recruiter. If it goes well you are invited to a coding interview with a senior engineer. The coding challenge was more of a general coding task rather than Leetcode questions (which I personally preferred a lot). I found the coding interview really nice.
If you pass you have a final round of system design and tech knowledge interview. For the system design interview, you should ask a lot of questions. What was different to me from other similar interviews is that your interviewer will not present the problem for you, instead let you know you can start and waiting for your questions.
You have to start by reading a text of requirements and are faced with user stories to then design a system for. My experience here was decent, didn't get any positive connection with the interviewer which threw me a bit off my game, you can expect it to be right to the point. (Once again, there's a senior engineer interviewing you).
I would say to ready yourself most with the final tech knowledge interview. You will have an engineering manager interviewing you here and it will be like a firing round of questions, the whole hour will be spent with you answering technical questions about topics related to the role. This interview is also very bland and I wasn't able to connect with the EM at all and get a feeling for what my potential future manager would be like. There was little room and a bit of a rush at the end to go ask your own questions to the EM as well. And here you are already exhausted by the amount of questions the EM will have asked you.
The overall experience was above average, I feel like your experience will vary a bit depending on who is interviewing you. I had some great experiences at the start of the process while having less great towards the end.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
microservices, rest apis, relational/non-relation databases, db indexes/joins, spring boot, caching, testing.
Thank you for sharing your experience on your interview process with us! We’re glad that you felt comfortable throughout and enjoyed the conversational dialogue.
- Talent Acquisition Team
Other Senior Software Engineer Interview Reviews for Zalando
intial call with recruiter and then a coding assessment test. coding was leetcode medium level questions. after that was a live coding interview. for approx 1 hour and then a systems design interview for designing a payment system.
The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Zalando (Berlin) in Oct 2025
Interview
The interviewer was looking desperately tired and unfocused. Didn't join the interview on time. I had to find someone else to ping him to join.
The questions were generic and related. However, it took 2 weeks for the interviewer to send the results of a basic questionnaire to move forward.
I was overall hugely disappointed with that.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you ensure the application you are working on meets the performance requirements?
I interviewed at Zalando (Helsinki, Southern Finland)
Interview
The interview process id extremely time consuming. It has technical coding and general interview questions. The interviews may vary from team to team. The information is around four year old.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Many things, previous employer. Future plans. Coding