Sai Deepesh's Blog

SDE-1(Web)/Frontend Engineer Interview Experience At ZestMoney

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Sai Deepesh
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5 min read

Hello Folks 👋👋, I hope you're doing extremely great. I'm Sai Deepesh, currently working as a Frontend Engineer at Labra.

So I've been rigorously interviewing for frontend engineering positions for a couple of months now and in the process, I got a chance to interview at ZestMoney as an SDE-1(Web), it is basically a Frontend Engineer position. So here's the interview experience from asking for a referral to the end.

So one random day I saw an SDE-1(Web) job posting on LinkedIn and immediately I took the job id and started sending out connections for the employees, lucky I got connected with a few of them and one person replied and referred me to the role, he was really supportive throughout my interview process and I really appreciate him for his help through the process. This was somewhere in Dec 2021 last week.

How It Started:

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After this, I got the call from the recruiter the next day itself. And we had a quick chat regarding the role and other typical HR questions like expected salary, current salary, etc... and she scheduled the first round.

Round 1(Screening Round): 1 hr

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This is an online test on Hackerrank which consisted of 3 questions 👇

  • DSA question: Brackets pair-matching matching problem.
  • JavaScript Problem Solving: Flatten Array problem.
  • HTML, CSS question: It was a simple UI question, where I have to build 3 circles circumcised inside one other UI(I'm not really getting how can I frame this 😅)

Round 2 (Tech Discussion): 1 hr

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Hurray 🥳🥳, I cleared the OA.

The second round was mostly a discussion(a little bit of hands-on coding) about my past projects, current work, web fundamentals(HTML, CSS, JS) like hoisting, closures, async programming, etc..., there were no DSA questions involved but the interviewer asked me to code some JS problems like implementing closure examples, implementing Map() prototype.

Not to mention we discussed a good amount of HTML, CSS questions as well, ex: async vs defer, position properties, box modal, event listeners, etc

Round 3 (Problem Solving & Machine Coding): 1hr

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Pheww 😌

Fortunately, I cleared the first round as well. This third one was completely a hands-on coding round, and here are the problems that the interviewer asked

1st one:


Given an array of objects [{banana: 5, apples:5}, {pear: 6}, {apples: 5}, {banana:2}], return an object with the sum of all the fruits

Ex: { apples: 10, banana: 7, pear:6 }

2nd one: 


Given a number in string format, return a single-digit no by recursively adding the digits in a string format

Ex: 
 - Input: '345'
 - Output: '3'

This JS fiddle contains my solutions for these questions

3rd one:

Build a dynamic form component with a progress bar indicating the progress of the inputs that were filled. We have to use an object and render the form accordingly

This was my solution.

As I was running out of time and the dynamic form component obviously takes some time, the interviewer was kind enough to ask me to send the solution after a couple of hours of completing the interview.

I was totally exhausted 😮‍💨🥵 throughout the day because I also gave an interview to another company right after this round

Round 4 (HM Round): 30 mins

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After clearing the third round, I was very much confident that I'm going to get this offer. It was mostly like a conversation between us, the interviewer started by asking me my past experience, my journey and the current projects that I've been working on.

And later on, the interviewer asked me some situational questions like

  • How do you review a pull request.
  • Is there any situation where there was a huge gap of understanding between me and the product manager.
  • What's the motivation to join ZestMoney

After that, I also asked some questions related to projects, tech stack, culture, etc.

Round 5 (Culture-Fit Round): 30 mins

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Again this was like a casual discussion about me and my personal and professional goals, IMHO, I felt this round was/is unnecessary instead they can have 1 hr of HM round.

And the end of it, the interviewer told me that HR will get in touch with me for the next steps.

Offer Stage:

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So after a couple of days, the first HR reached out to me via email and asked me for some documents to release an offer, at this point it was more than a month since I'd given the Hackerrank test and to my surprise in spite of conducting too many rounds and grilling me out, they didn't meet my expectations and competing offers, so I directly rejected in the phone call itself.

I think my second round was not that great, maybe because there were expecting me to solve all the questions in that 1 hr itself, and that's why they didn't want to match the offer 🤷‍♂️.

How It Went:

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Closing Thoughts:

  • Understand the fundaments very well 🧠.
  • Referral actually works, just be patient 💪.
  • Luck do favours, sometimes maybe 🤣.

That's it, I hope this post will be helpful to you all and if you have any queries/suggestions comment down below or you can reach out to me via Twitter.

Thankfully I got an offer from a good start-up, will be joining them soon, All the best for your interviews, good luck 🤞🤞.

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