Zalando Software Engineer interview experience

The total loop was described as seven rounds, and the last four were typically scheduled back to back. It came across as if the interviewers were checking boxes rather than actually running a coherent technical conversation.

By the time I hit the later stages, the live coding felt like a LeetCode-style exercise that didn’t connect cleanly to real work, and the system design portion felt vague—more like a placeholder than a clearly defined systems discussion. Even the feedback on my performance was unclear and unhelpful, sometimes amounting to silence or just comments about missing specific