What Is the Zalando Interview Process Like? (Round by Round)

Zalando publishes its own engineering interview process, and it lists five stages. The stages are an initial call with a Talent Acquisition Partner, an interview with the hiring manager, a coding interview, a system design and architecture interview, and a general tech interview. Talent Acquisition Partner is Zalando's title for a recruiter. The first call runs about 30 minutes, and each technical round runs about one hour. Zalando states that an average process takes two to three weeks.

Quick Overview

Stage 1: The Talent Acquisition Partner Call

A short video or phone call about your background and your reasons for applying. Zalando says this call covers your motivation, your expectations from the role, and your strengths and career accomplishments. The recruiter also describes the role, the business area, and the company culture.

Zalando lists this call as 30 minutes in both of its published interview guides. The call includes time for your own general questions about the company. Zalando also states that its main business language is English, and it asks for applications in English. Prepare the motivation question before you take it, using How to answer why Zalando.

Stage 2: Hiring Manager Interview

Thirty minutes to one hour with the manager who owns the open role. Zalando describes this stage as a discussion of your experience, your career successes, and the challenges you have faced. Expect questions about how you approach a project and how you work with a team. Prepare for technical depth here as well, because this manager leads the technical work of the team.

Stage 3: Coding Interview

About one hour of live coding in a shared editor. Zalando says it looks at three things: whether you understood the requirements, how you structured your code, and whether you can state the running time and memory cost.

Candidates report algorithm problems at medium difficulty, including sliding window, sorting, and string manipulation questions. Some report two engineers on the call rather than one. Some also report an online coding test earlier in the process, used for certain roles rather than all of them.

Zalando's own guide recommends a method called REACTO, which means repeat the question, give examples, state your approach, write the code, test it, then optimize it. Say each step out loud, because the interviewer grades your reasoning as well as your result.

Stage 4: System Design and Architecture Interview

One hour on a design problem. Zalando gives a short problem description and asks you to design a system that solves it. The stated grading areas are architecture, scalability, technology choices, resilience, operational excellence, and security. Operational excellence means the system can be run, monitored, and repaired by an on-call team.

Candidates report retail problems such as a shopping cart, a payment system, and a store for a small business. The full topic list is in What to expect in the Zalando system design interview.

Stage 5: General Tech Interview

One hour on the craft of building software. Zalando says this round covers the software development lifecycle and your own experience. Expect questions about the technologies in your past projects, software design patterns, and computer science fundamentals.

Candidates also report plain questions such as how interfaces work in Java and what polymorphism means. Breadth matters more than puzzle solving in this round.

Timeline and Decision

Zalando states that it hopes to reply to an application within seven days. It also states that two weeks is the longest you should expect to wait for feedback after an interview, although candidates report longer waits than that in practice.

Reported end to end times range from about two weeks to a couple of months, depending on the role and the number of interviewers. The wait after each stage is described in How long it takes to hear back.

Questions to Ask Them

Zalando's own guide tells candidates to always ask questions, so prepare three. Useful ones here: how teams own services after launch, how the team measures its effect on customers, and how much of its roadmap a team decides itself. Zalando publishes its engineering principles and its API guidelines in public, so ask how those standards are applied inside a team. Ask about on-call too, because service ownership is part of the engineering culture.

How to Prepare

• Drill coding patterns first. Grokking the Coding Interview teaches the patterns behind sliding window, sorting, and string problems.
• Prepare real trade-offs for the design round. Grokking the System Design Interview covers the queues, caches, and databases a retail design needs.
• Read Zalando's public engineering material. The API guidelines and the engineering blog show the standards the design round is graded against.
• Rehearse the general tech round separately. List every technology on your resume and be ready to defend each choice.
• Practice naming costs out loud. State the running time and the memory cost of your code as you write it, because the published guide names both.