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Zomato SRE Roadmap

Targeted preparation for Zomato SRE and Platform Engineering roles. Covers Zomato's tech stack, scale challenges, interview format, and the exact topics they test.

3–5 months prep
6 phases
FoundationIntermediateAdvancedExpert
Phase 1

Zomato's Scale & Tech Stack

Understand the platform you'll be operating

Foundation1–2 weeks

What to learn

  • Zomato runs on AWS + Kubernetes at massive scale
  • Microservices architecture — 500M+ orders processed
  • Go, Python, and Node.js are primary languages
  • Real-time order tracking systems
  • High-frequency DB writes — MySQL, Redis, Kafka
  • CDN and media delivery for 300K+ restaurant images

Key tools

AWSKubernetesKafkaRedisMySQL
Phase 2

Linux & Systems Internals

SRE interviews go deep on OS knowledge

Foundation3–4 weeks

What to learn

  • Process scheduling, memory management, file descriptors
  • Network stack — TCP handshake, TIME_WAIT, SO_REUSEADDR
  • systemd service management and debugging
  • strace, perf, tcpdump for live debugging
  • Linux performance tools: sar, iostat, vmstat
  • Kernel tuning for high-throughput services
Phase 3

Kubernetes Operations

Zomato runs everything on K8s

Intermediate4–5 weeks

What to learn

  • Multi-cluster Kubernetes management
  • HPA/KEDA for order surge autoscaling
  • Spot instance handling — graceful pod eviction
  • Ingress, service mesh, east-west traffic
  • Resource quotas, LimitRanges, PodDisruptionBudgets
  • Rolling deployments with zero downtime
Phase 4

Observability & Incident Response

Own production incidents end-to-end

Intermediate3–4 weeks

What to learn

  • SLOs and error budgets for order success rate
  • Prometheus + Grafana for real-time dashboards
  • Distributed tracing for order flow
  • On-call runbooks and escalation paths
  • Post-mortem writing — Zomato values blameless culture
  • Alert fatigue — tuning alert thresholds
Phase 5

System Design for Food-Tech Scale

Design systems that handle lunch rush

Advanced5–6 weeks

What to learn

  • Design real-time order tracking (WebSockets, SSE)
  • Design restaurant search with geo-indexing
  • Rate limiting — protect during flash sales
  • Queue-based order dispatch with Kafka
  • Circuit breakers for payment gateway failures
  • Multi-region failover for zero-downtime deploys

Key tools

KafkaRedisPostgreSQLElasticSearchAWS
Phase 6

Interview Format & Prep

Crack the Zomato SRE loop

Expert3–4 weeks

What to learn

  • Round 1: Linux/networking deep dive (phone screen)
  • Round 2: Kubernetes + observability (technical)
  • Round 3: System design (45–60 min)
  • Round 4: Coding — Python/Go scripting (not DSA-heavy)
  • Round 5: Culture fit — ownership and speed values
  • Tip: Zomato values people who've debugged real prod issues

Key tools

HackerRankExcalidraw (system design)LeetCode (easy-medium)

Interview Prep

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