What Is the Delivery Hero Android Staff Engineer Interview Process Like?

Delivery Hero publishes its hiring stages on its careers site. It lists a talent acquisition call, a technical assessment, a hiring manager interview, a collaboration interview, and a final interview. It says the process usually takes four to six weeks.

Delivery Hero's tech blog adds detail for engineers. It describes the coding exercise as closer to pair programming than to an exam. It also describes a bar raiser interview run by someone from another part of the company.

Quick Overview

Delivery Hero does not publish an Android specific loop. The stages above are company wide, so the Android content sits inside the technical assessment.

What Candidates Report for Android

Reports describe a technical round on Android fundamentals and components. Some also describe algorithm questions in that same round. Treat this as reported, because Delivery Hero does not publish it.

Reports also describe a later round with two Android engineers. It mixes behavioral questions with live coding. The bar raiser then repeats a technical conversation about patterns and architecture.

Delivery Hero's own advice is worth following. It tells candidates not to rush into code. Describe the problem and your plan out loud first.

The Product Creates the Design Question

Delivery Hero runs many local brands from one company. Its brands include foodpanda, Glovo, talabat, PedidosYa, foodora, Baemin, and Yemeksepeti. Its server driven user interface work says the platform covers more than 70 markets.

That creates three mobile problems, and a design question will contain at least one of them.

• Live order tracking. The user wants to watch a courier move while the phone is locked. So the design needs a foreground service, an ongoing notification that updates, and a location or order stream. Say what happens when the operating system stops the app, and how the state is rebuilt on open.
• Many brands from one codebase. The same app ships under different names, colors, languages, and payment methods. So separate the shared modules from the brand layer. Use design tokens and per market configuration instead of branching the code.
• Weak devices and weak networks. Many markets run older Android phones on slow connections. So talk about install size, cold start time, and decoding images to the size of the view. Add cursor pagination and a local database that lets the screen work with no network.

Server Driven User Interface Changes the Answer

Delivery Hero has published a lot about server driven user interface. It describes a client library that combines a template with data to build native screens. It also describes moving business logic out of the app and into a graph layer.

One figure from that work is useful in a round. The client once requested 80 fields and computed the layout locally. After the change it requested four, and the server sent screen ready data.

This is a real staff level trade-off, so name both sides. Server driven screens let product teams change a layout without an app release. They also cost you type safety, offline rendering, and easy debugging on the device.

What Staff Adds Over Senior

A senior answer builds order tracking and names the failure states. A staff answer answers a harder question: who else has to change?

Say which teams own the shared modules and which own the brand layer. Say what a new market needs in order to launch. Say how a shared change is released without breaking seven brands at once.

Then cover rollout. App releases reach markets at different speeds, and old versions stay installed for months. So version your API responses, keep old clients working, and put every new screen behind a flag.

How to Prepare

• Prepare the client design round. Grokking Modern Mobile System Design Interview covers order tracking, server driven UI, and low end devices as worked case studies.
• Read Delivery Hero's tech blog. Its posts on mobile architecture and server driven user interface describe the exact problems its interviewers work on.
• Practice one food delivery design end to end. Requirements, API, client layers, live tracking, then failure and release. What Is the Android System Design Interview Like? sets out that order.
• Prepare the low end device answer. Install size, cold start, image decoding, and pagination are graded here more than at a company with rich users.
• Learn the backend half as background. Grokking System Design Fundamentals covers caching, queues, and APIs, which is useful background for the server half.
• Compare nearby loops. Square and Monzo run very different processes.
• Work through the question families. What Questions Are Asked in a Mobile System Design Interview? and this list of mobile system design interview questions list them.