Swiggy interview process and practice questions

Behavioral questions

1. Tell me about a time you shipped something fast. What trade-offs did you make?

   A good answer covers

   • Why speed mattered, in terms of users or the business
   • What you cut or simplified, and what you refused to cut
   • What you fixed or finished after launch

2. Tell me about a feature you built that users loved.

   A good answer covers

   • The user problem it solved, and how you knew it was a real problem
   • Your part in building it
   • How you knew users loved it: usage, ratings or feedback, ideally with a number

3. Tell me about a time you disagreed with a decision, said so, and then committed to it fully.

   A good answer covers

   • Your view and the evidence behind it
   • How and to whom you raised it
   • How you backed the final decision in practice, and how it turned out

4. Describe a time you delivered something useful with fewer people, less time or less money than you wanted.

   A good answer covers

   • The constraint and what the full version would have needed
   • How you simplified the problem or reused what existed
   • What you delivered and what it achieved

5. Tell me about feedback that was hard to hear. What did you change because of it?

   A good answer covers

   • The feedback, stated plainly, and who gave it
   • Your first reaction and how you checked whether it was fair
   • A concrete change in how you work since

Role and technical questions

1. How would you design order tracking for a food-delivery app?

   A good answer covers

   • The order's states (placed, accepted, picked up, delivered) and who updates each
   • Getting the partner's live location to the customer: update rate, push versus polling, battery
   • What the customer sees when data is late or a partner's phone goes offline

2. How would you assign incoming orders to delivery partners in a busy area at dinner time?

   A good answer covers

   • Inputs: partner locations, restaurant preparation time, distance and current load
   • The goal you optimise: delivery time versus partner idle time, and when to batch two orders
   • What happens when a partner rejects or goes offline, and fairness in how work is shared

3. How would you estimate the delivery time shown to a customer before they place an order?

   A good answer covers

   • Splitting it into parts: preparation, partner reaching the restaurant, travel to the customer
   • Data for each part: past orders by restaurant and time, traffic, weather
   • Measuring accuracy, updating the estimate live, and the cost of promising too little or too much

4. How would you keep stock accurate in a quick-commerce app that serves customers from many small stores?

   A good answer covers

   • A source of truth per store, updated on orders, picking and restocking
   • Holding items at checkout so two customers don't buy the last one
   • Handling mismatches found while picking: substitutes, partial refunds, alerts

5. Payments in one city start failing during a cricket final. Walk me through your first 30 minutes.

   A good answer covers

   • Confirming scope on dashboards: which city, payment method or gateway, since when
   • Mitigating first: routing to another gateway, switching off a heavy feature
   • Keeping others informed, then a blameless review of the cause

6. Explain the trade-offs between polling, WebSockets and push notifications for live updates in a mobile app.

   A good answer covers

   • Polling: simple but wasteful; WebSockets: live but many open connections to manage
   • Push notifications for when the app is in the background
   • Battery and data use on low-end phones and patchy networks

7. Repeat orders from new users in one city fell last month. How would you find out why?

   A good answer covers

   • Checking the data first, then splitting by area, platform and first-order experience
   • Likely causes: late deliveries, fees, fewer restaurants, a competitor's offer
   • The most likely cause and how you'd test a fix

Why Swiggy? Fit and HR questions

1. Why Swiggy? Which of Swiggy's values fits how you like to work?

   A good answer covers

   • A reason tied to the product or the problems, not only the brand
   • One value, named once, with a short example from your work
   • What you hope to learn or build here

2. Which part of Swiggy (food delivery, Instamart or dining out) would you like to work on, and what would you improve first?

   A good answer covers

   • A clear pick and why it interests you
   • One specific improvement for customers, restaurants, stores or delivery partners
   • How you'd measure whether it worked

Tips

• Real-time systems (tracking, dispatch, ETAs) are favourite design topics.
• Swiggy groups its published values into heart, head and hands; prepare a story each for consumer focus, founder mentality and disagree-and-commit.
• For machine coding, get a working version running early, then refactor into clear classes, and leave time to walk the interviewer through it.
• In design answers, cover everyone the system serves: customers, restaurant partners and delivery partners.
• Mention cheap phones and patchy networks when you talk about the apps; it shows you're thinking about real users across India.