Deliveroo Interview Process - Senior Backend Engineer

Reached out to a Deliveroo recruiter on Linkedin and got the interviews scheduled.

It was for Senior role.

Screening round: Hackerrank assessment

This was an AI-assisted assessment where you would be bug-fixing or building some core components of a food-delivery app. 2 problems each were allocated 20 mins.

The task was to just pass all the test cases.

Round-1: AI-assisted coding

This was to build a food delivery app's refund workflow for late deliveries. Asked me to build two HTTP services on local machine - Order Service and Refund Service, and implement refund workflow such that if an order is late, refund service will pick that up and issue refund.

I was not given with any initial repo. Only a small readme file on Hackerrank describing the problem statement.

Round-2: Live Coding

A typical LC-style problem. The goal was to test thoroughly and ensure all the test cases were successful. I got surprised that in the feedback it was written negatively that in first run I got few test cases failed.

Round-3: System Design

Problem statement: Deliveroo is conducting a 3-day charity event, where 10 charities will be involved and people will be allowed to donate to their favorite charity. Anyone can donate, i.e. it doesn't need to be any registered user. Approx $100 million are expected to be collected in the donation.

Result: Reject

Advice / Feedback:

In the coding related interviews, they are more focused on how much you are testing, I received feedback that the testing was fine but I should have included performance tests as well.

In the System Design, they want you to be explicit about every design choice. E.g. I said "any database would be fine here and I will go with SQL" backfired me with a feedback mentioning that I should have mentioned both pros and cons of the database I chose even if any database would have worked.