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Ashutosh Kumar's Interview Experience

Verified
Zeta
Engineering Intern + PPO ( Performance Based)
2025

My Zeta Campus Placement Interview Experience

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview with Zeta during their campus placement drive at Ramaiah Institute of Technology. The process was challenging, collaborative, and an incredible learning experience.

Round 1 – Coding Assessment

  • Mode: On-campus (College Lab)

  • Duration: 1 hr 30 mins

  • Questions: 3 coding problems

    1. Priority Queue with Custom Comparator – Implemented from scratch.
    2. Probability & Modular Exponentiation – A math-heavy problem.
    3. Debugging – Given faulty code to fix.

The first two were medium difficulty; the last one leaned towards hard. After this round, shortlisted candidates were called for interviews the next day.

Round 2 – DSA Problem-Solving

  • Time: 11 AM (Campus Placement Department)
  • Format: Online Meet with interviewer, coding in a shared Microsoft document.

Problem: Given an integer N, sort numbers 1 to N lexicographically. Example: N = 13 → [1,10,11,12,13,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]

My Approach:

  • Started with a brute force method using a map.
  • Interviewer asked to optimize space and time.
  • After iterative improvements and discussing edge cases, we arrived at an optimized base-logic approach without extra space overhead.
  • Throughout, I cited time and space complexities for each solution.

Takeaway: The interviewer appreciated my collaborative problem-solving style and thinking aloud during the process.

Round 3 – Project + HR Discussion

This round was in-person with two interviewers. They also asked me to open my laptop and show the source code of one of my projects, checking for clean code practices and questioning specific choices.

Questions I Was Asked:

  • What is this internship you did?
  • What is gRPC, what are RPCs in general, what improvement it offers?
  • What purpose does it serve, who developed it, were you in a team? Who did what part of the project?
  • Was the choice of language and problem statement given by the company?
  • How does multithreading work in your project?

Questions about my projects — StudyNotion, Confetti, and hackathon projects like Bail Saarthi and Crawlshastra:

  • How to secure an application? What is JWT? What are cookies? How to make sure they are securely stored?
  • What is a RAG model? How does it work under the hood? Need for RAG? Why not fine-tuning? What’s the difference?
  • How did you implement video conferencing using WebRTC? How does it work?
  • What is WebSockets? What are Web Workers?
  • Why MongoDB? When to use MongoDB and when to use an SQL-based database like Postgres? In which scenarios is each good or bad?
  • What did you use LangChain for? What are AI agents? How are basic LLM apps different from agents?
  • Why use React and not a framework like Next.js or Angular?
  • What do you know about Java? How does Java run code under the hood?
  • What was the project of the hackathon you won? What were you working on in it? What did you solve? How many teams were there? How many were shortlisted? What was there in your solution that made you win?
  • Difference between HTTP and HTTPS. How does hashing work in maps data structures?
  • What is REST? Explain each req? Also if I send data in GET req what happens?
  • What is Node? How does it work under the hood? Why the need for Node.js?
  • WebSockets vs WebRTC. HTTP 1.1 vs 2. How does React work under the hood?

Question: If you are given a rand() function which generates numbers between 0 and 1 inclusive, then how will you bring it between (l, r) range all inclusive? Answer: l + (r - l) * rand()

HR Questions

  • Have you ever had conflict in a team? How did you solve it?
  • Do you know what Zeta works on?
  • In a team environment, have you ever had to take responsibility of being a leader? How did you cater to it?
  • What other habits do you have apart from coding? What do you like to do in spare time?

Result

After 2–3 days, results were announced — I was one of the selected candidates.

Final Thoughts

The Zeta interview process was rigorous but very interactive. The emphasis wasn’t just on getting the “right” answer but on how you think, optimize, and communicate. My biggest learning — think aloud, collaborate, and iterate solutions until they are robust.